The Analytics Tab displays detailed and summarized information about hits on your site. Website analytics can provide insights and data about your visitors that can help you create a better user experience for them. Understanding the nature and behavior of your visitors is also key to optimizing a website for key conversion metrics.

Hit Summary

The Hit summary sub-tab shows a table of daily totals of each type of hit on your site.

See Global Hits Summary.

Browser Hits Summary

The Browser hits sub-tab show a breakdown of the browser hits.

See Browser Hits Summary.

Direct Accesses

These are hits from people who came to your blog by direct access (either by typing the URL directly, or using a bookmark. Invalid (too short) referers are also listed here.)

Referers

A referal is when a reader comes to your blog by clicking a link from another site. For example, if b2evolution.net had a link on it pointing to your site, then each time a reader clicked on that link you would have a new referer stat from b2evolution.net. This can be tracked thanks to the HTTP Referer header. Checking this section is a good way to find out who is linking to you. The table at the top of the page shows the most recent referers. At the bottom of the page you’ll find a table of the top referers.

Because b2evolution used to display referral statistics publicly, many spammers started sending fake referrals to b2evolution blogs (they’re fake because their site doesn’t really link to yours). The spammers were trying to sneak a link onto your site that links back to them, thereby raising their search engine ranking. Current installations of b2evolution don’t display this information publicly, but the spammers are still at it. The stats page includes a little Ban symbol in each row so you can quickly ban any spammy referals. You’ll be taken to the tab where you can delete all referrals from that URL and blacklist it so they can’t add any more.

Refering Searches

Some hits on your blog come from people who found you in a search engine. But what were they searching for when they found your blog? b2evolution keeps track of that too each time this information can be found in the HTTP Referer header. The referring searches tab shows you what search engine the hit came from, and what the reader had been searching for. Click on the text of the search term and you’ll be taken to the results page that links to your blog. The right column shows which of your blog posts the reader ended up on.

Top referring search engines shows you which search engines are sending you the most traffic. And Top Indexing Robots shows which search engine robots are spending the most time indexing your site.

Syndication

Some people may read your blog by subscribing to your RSS feed in an RSS aggregator. It’s basically web-based or desktop software that keeps track of all the sites a person wants to read, then notifies them of any updates and very often shows them the text of your post without them ever needing to visit your site. When an aggregation service scans your site for new updates, the hit is recorded here. Many services even report how many of their users are subscribing to your feed when they index your site.

User Agents

Have you ever wondered what web browser and operating system your readers use? You can find those stats in the User Agents tab.

Goals

Goals allow you to track clicks on specific links and/or visits on specific pages.