Techy Question - Website Statistics

I'm putting my site together with WordPress and I'm starting to get overwhelmed with "statistics" tracking. (...not that I have any statistics to track yet! lol)

I've got Google Analytic statistics, my host (BlueHost) provides statistics, Market Samurai provides statistics, JetPack provides statistics (except I'm not sure I'm going to use this one), etc., etc.

Can anyone provide insight on how they monitor what's going on with there site(s). I just don't want to install a bunch of services and watch a bunch of websites that I can really do with just a few simple one. Make sense?!? I'm trying to value my time and be more productive..."get the info I need and get out" kind of mentality.

Thanks.

Eileen

You have the host stats anyway - they are a given. You should also have Google Analytics and the stats that come with JetPack.

Your hosts stats measure everything - but they are not easy to interpret so leave those alone unless you get hacked or something like that and need to look into things deeply,

Jetpack measures pageviews - not unique visits - but they are still great for every day views of what is going on, and you can look at the summary tables to compare this week to last, to day to yesterday, etc, see your referrers and any sign of search traffic.

Google Analytics measure unique visitors amongst other things.

I tend to just use the JetPack stats every day, unless I see something weird there I need to investigate in which case I go to GA. I look at GA about once a week to work on things like goals and conversions.

Liz

The tricky part for monitoring services is separating the true human visitors from crawlers and people up to no good like hackers. Google Analytics seems to be overstated in my opinion although I have it installed on all sites. I started using Clicky a few months ago and those seem to be more in line.

I also started using the WordFence security plugin lately. While this is not a stats program, it does give you live traffic so you can see where it is coming from. It is amazing how many people are hitting your login page trying to break in using "admin" as the username. I know this is a thread about stats, but please, if your username is "admin", change it as soon as possible.

The analytics tool offered to you by the host would show you the statistics based on the requests hitting the server that hosts your website, this includes human visitors and bots and other requests made to the server. If you really wish to get an overview of how your site's performing, stick with Google Analytics. It's got a good interface and a simple graphical representation which makes things easy to understand.

I agree with using Google Analytics beause it's user-friendly and easier to understand. It shows your unique visitors, page views, bounce rate, average time onsite; traffic counts on a given time of the day, referrer, keywords, and the location where your traffic is coming from. These statistics will give you a general understanding of what, where, and who your market is, and which of your content, your readers like the most. Given all these data you can monitor and analyze your traffic, and you can adjust your SEO campaign. Using too many tools can be confusing, unless you have a high understanding of them.

I use google analytics and Awstats on bluehost. After awhile you will get a feel for the true numbers by comparing the two. I look at stats once a month. If your not careful you can become a stats junkie :)