If 75 percent of my day is spent writing, the remaining 25 percent is probably going over TechCrunch stats. I’m obsessed with it. That’s why I do so many posts about things like Chrome getting ready to overtake Firefox as the dominant browser among TechCrunch readers (less than 1 percent away now). So I was obviously happy when WordPress.com (which hosts us) overhauled their Stats area earlier this year. But it was always missing just one thing.
WordPress.com’s Stats area gives you a solid overview for how your blog is doing overall. And unlike Google Analytics, the data is up-to-the-minute fresh. You can see your top posts, top referrers, top search engine terms, top clicked links, and a few other things. One thing it doesn’t have though is the ability to see how each author is doing in terms of traffic to their posts. In other words, it’s lacking in the vanity department. But that’s coming shortly.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg shot us over a quick snapshot of the new feature that they’re cooking up. As you can see, it will be a new box that shows you the Top Authors alongside the others like Top Posts, etc. The top ten list also shows you corresponding traffic numbers (I’ve removed those in the screenshot) and apparently the total number of your posts getting traffic on any given day (at least I think that’s what the number is parentheses is).
Obviously, I’m happy because I’m at the top. But that’s just for today (plus, I clearly have a huge back catalog, so it’s a little unfair).
Sure, there are a range of other plug-ins for WordPress that offer similar functionality, but now the vanity element will be fully baked into WordPress’ real-time analytics system. This is a nice addition for larger multi-author blogs. Previously, it has been kind of a pain to get these numbers in an accurate way.
Mullenweg notes that this feature should roll out in the next week or so.