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One of the key aspects of blogging successfully is understanding your audience. Luckily there are some great plugins for the WordPress platform that can help you achieve targeting your audience in the best possible way. Any stats that I offer on the platforms themselves are available on the WordPress Plugin directory or I have provided the link for more information. After looking through what platforms were best for understanding a blog audience, these 7 are my favorite. Further, the WordPress Plugin directory can also be used to find a variety of plugins that you might be interested in addition to wanting to understand your audience better.
You are likely already familiar with Google Analytics—it is one of the best programs available to give you information on who is visiting your website and audience demographics. If you want all of the benefits of Google Analytics, for example, tracking the number of visitors you have, where they come from, what they do on your site, tracking pageviews, outbound links, and file downloads, etc. then a plugin can help you get there faster.
In other words, a bonus of this plugin is that you can actually view everything right on your WordPress dashboard, which means you can view your metrics without having to login to Google Analytics every time. It is also really easy to set-up:
- Add the Google Analytics tracking code to your site.
- Track 404 error pages and user searches.
- Get “easy dashboards” in your WordPress install.
- Set up any specific reports that you want to run.
This is a must-have feature for companies with strict content strategies, so it’s a great way to kick off content analysis if that’s something you’re trying to get involved with in the future.
In addition to running analytics to see the demographics of your audience, you may also want to consider that social media is also an indicator of your audience. You definitely want to know how your content is doing on social networks to better understand your audience. This WordPress plugin will track shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and Google+. Ultimately, this allows you to see how your blog is performing in terms of social media shares, and this particular tool allows you to see an overview over your current performance without having to use external utilities. However, if you want to do further analysis Social Metrics Tracker does let you export your results to a spreadsheet.
So far we have covered Google Analytics and Social media, but there are other ways to connect with your audience using WordPress plugins. Another new plugin that is getting a lot of attention is GetSiteControl. This plugin allows you to: Easily create surveys, create contact forms promo boxes, and subscription forms, design social media follow buttons and share buttons , and use chat functionality with visitors.
I’ve noticed that many of these plugins also have a very easy set-up, which is nice. For the GetSiteControl plugin, all of the setup is actually done on their website with a very user-friendly interface. Once you go through this process, you will add the small JavaScript code to your website. Again, one of the reasons that this plugin has been getting attention is because of both the usefulness and usability.
Note: Like most of the plugins that WordPress features, the basic service is free, however there is also a premium version, which has additional features.
In addition to Google Analytics, you may want to consider an additional (or alternative) statistics plugin for analysis. On the WordPress plugin site, they list all of the many stats that this particular plugin monitors runs (which makes it a user/Wordpress plugin favorite). A few key features include:
- Unique User Analytics: analyze your unique users
- Statistics by city
- Statistics by country
- Statistics screen resolution
- Stats widget (tracker analytics widget)
- change of location of the stats counter (place holder)
- detailed analytics & statistics
- Statistical Data Bit
- Operating Systems
- Landing pages
- Unique visitors
- Returned Visitors (Web Page “Views”)
- Browser Brands
- design counter (analytics counter design customization)
- Password protected Counter
- Hidden Counter
You want your audience to be able to contact you. More importantly, once they do, you want a contact form that works. There have been a lot of plugins to fulfill this need, however, without a system, for example receiving the submissions forms via email there is no guarantee that you are going to receive each and every form. Even having your forms submitted via email is not the best—email delivery can actually be very unreliable as it really varies from one web host to another. It is easy to understand why this is a problem. I would recommend that you don’t leave something as important as contact forms in the hands of your web host.
Contact Form DB is definitely a pro in this arena, and has gotten outstanding reviews from other sites outside of WordPress itself. Not only is it a reliable platform, but it also supports 9 other contact form plugins so that merging it to your existing set-up is easy. As a bonus, it is very simple to use and does not require any user configuration.
Rather than sending contact forms via email, Contact Form DB records every form submission into its own database and allows you to view it anytime you want. This ensures that contact forms will not be lost and you can designate time and energy to responding to all received contact forms at one time.
While you have probably already figured that there are a ton of analytics tools to choose from (with Google Analytics coming out on top in most situations). I like Clicky because it actually embeds a lot of these key statistics using a widget directly on your site. These stats like any other analytics site include online users, number of visits and actions, bounce rates, organic searches, and time average.
All Clicky Analytics stats are available in a custom dashboard, which can be found under your blog’s administration panel. Here are some additional features of Clicky to consider (directly from their website) about what their dashboard has to offer:
Admin Dashboard features:
- Access your website’s basic statistics in a widget on your Administration Dashboard (a unique Clicky feature).
- Cache feature, which improves loading speeds.Option to display top 30 pages, referrers and searches.
- Display Clicky Analytics statistics on frontend, at the end of each article.
- Multilingual support.
Tracking Features:
- Enable/disable Clicky Web Analytics tracking code.
- User names tracking feature.
- E-mail tracking feature.
- Video actions tracking for Youtube.
- Video actions tracking for HTML5.
- Asynchronously load of Clicky Web Analytics tracking code
The last featured plugin offers features to display “Visitor Maps” with location pins, city, and country. It also includes a “Who’s Online Sidebar” so that you can see how many users are online on your site at any given time. This plugin also includes a “Who’s Online admin dashboard” to view any specific visitor details. Best of all, no API key needed and installing is extremely easy with a four-step process.
The visitor details include: What page the visitor is on, the IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more.
Key Features:
- Configure Options from Admin panel.
- Visitor details of search bots, members, guests, and you.
- Optional widget for sidebar, or footer. Enable display of city, state, and country flag.
- Enable geolocation for automatic location pin Visitor Maps.
- Enable “Who Is” lookup.
- Enable host lookups for IP addresses.
- Visitor details are stored in a database table for about 30 days.
- Uses GeoLiteCity data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com
- Valid coding for HTML and XHTML.
The Takeaway
There are many plugins available for better understanding your audience, again, you can view and even larger range of them through the WordPress search engine. All of the specific features information was reported either on the WordPress site directly, or on the plugins website. Understanding your audience is definitely key to having a successful blog, so we hope this list of plugins gets you going in the right direction. You may also want to consider first designing your own custom WordPress design, which you can learn more about from No Risk SEO here, so that you don’t have to download too many plugins, but they are a great next step.
Are there any plugins you would add to the list? Let us know your favorites in the comment section below.