Yahoo Web Analytics Wordpress Plug-in from Rudi Shumpert

Even for amateur blog authors, understanding your site traffic is critical to building a site that provides information and services that people are asking for.  Even if you are just blogging about your kids soccer game, understanding where your traffic is coming from and what they are doing on the site can not only prove interesting but may help you target your posts for your most faithful readers.

Google Analytics is by far the most popular free web analytics service that is available but with Yahoo’s acquisition of IndexTools in the summer of 2008, Yahoo has been dipping their toe in the deep end and it looks like they are poised to give Google a run for their money.  If I had to bet one way or another, I’d put my money on Google but I wouldn’t count Yahoo out yet as Google has failed to do anything that would suggest they are ready to step on the throats of their competitors.

I have recently been experimenting with Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA) and have been pleasantly surprised with their offering. For a part-time blogger it is more than powerful enough to give you insight into your site activity.

Recently, Rudi Shumpert, released a Wordpress plug-in that automatically deploys YWA tracking to your blog.  You don’t need to know PHP or anything about Yahoo’s tracking code, you simply install the plug-in, provide a few details, and the plug-in does the rest.  I have been testing the plug-in and had it installed and running in under two minutes.

What I love most about the plug-in, is that it is theme independent.  I can change my theme a thousand times and never have to worry about moving my analytics tracking code from theme to theme, the plug-in simply applies to code to all the pages of my blog.  It’s a beautiful thing.

If you have an existing YWA account, installation of the plug-in is easy.  Under the Plugins section in your Wordpress admin, click ‘Add New’

Search for ‘YWA’ and click install.

For detailed information about configuration steps and plug-in versions, please visit Rudi’s plug-in site