If you are anything like me, you are a complete & total nut when it comes to the analytics of your site. I am one of those people who looks at his Google Analytics multiple times a week to see how the site is doing. But, one thing that I never liked was the fact that while Google gives me great information, it wasn’t real time statistics. However, a few months ago I was able to correct this by installing the Who’s Online Plugin for WordPress. Since then I have become such a huge fan of this plugin that I now install it on every Custom WordPress Site I build for my clients.
Now you may be asking why would you want to see real time data on how your site is performing. Here are 3 simple and easy to understand reasons:
1. Test the limits of your server– Ever visit a site and you see the dreaded Error message that the server is over capacity? I know I have & hate when I see that. I’ve had it happen only once here on this site and after running some tests and seeing that it wasn’t traffic on the site, I learned quickly that I needed to remove a plugin that was using entirely too much bandwidth to run. Once I removed the plugin everything was smooth sailing again. Since then, I’ve tracked over 490 people sitting on my server at once without it crashing.
2. Measure the effectiveness of your social sphere- I use this plugin as a good measure of how my social media efforts are going. Right now I have slightly over 9,000 followers on Twitter. What I’ve been able to gather from using this plugin is that when I tweet a blog post the amount of clicks on my links go up when I am spending more time on Twitter engaging others and having conversations with them. This has become even more evident over the past few weeks as I have been very busy with social media speaking gigs around the country. With the higher level of travel, there has been less time for online engagement on Twitter. I’ve also noticed the same on other social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn.
3. Determine the optimal time of day to share content- Have you ever wondered when is the best time of day to send your content live into the interwebs to garner the most traffic? While there is no optimal time that is perfect for every business, this tool will help you to determine times and days that work for your personal business. If you tweet a link to a post on Thursday evening and only get 10 clicks you will learn that you may want to try to deliver your new content on a Thursday morning at 8AM if that is garnering 85-100 clicks. Use this tool to track your instant traffic and you can learn the best time of the day.
Now that I’ve shared three ways I use the Who’s Online Plugin for WordPress, let me leave you with a video demonstration of the plugin.
These are just three ways how I use this tool, if you can think of others please share below in the comments. And sorry Chris, you didn’t break my server…yet.
you can view the backend of the site but how do we view this when the plug in is installed so we can see where people are coming from?
When you are logged into the backend of your site, click the Who’s Online
button on the top left & it will show you.
Very important to note on a busy site this can be quite taxing on the server resources. For the average real estate agent or independent contractor not likely to be a problem. Your point that it is a way to measure results real-time should not be missed. Not that it is generally crucial but certainly it is emotionally rewarding to know you just posted a link to Twitter or Facebook and immediately see the results. Of course the inverse applies, too.
Those are some good points Ken. Thanks for sharing!
wow… thank you very much. i didnt know about such plugin existance. very ineresting i should say. you know, i like google analytics. of course, it is great but as i understood this thing is awesome. so… have nothing to do but find more and more information and use it) thanks for giving ue new information and help us in further development!