Tracking blog post views on WordPress blog, ignoring pages

Question

I've got a WordPress-based blog which also hosts a few popular jQuery plugins. These plugin pages get a lot of traffic (in the range of 10k views on weekdays), burying any page views on regular blog posts. I'd like to know which and how many blog posts are actually read.

So far I tried to set up a seperate Google Analytics profile, filtering out those static pages with a directory-exclude filter. Can't really get that working, the results (after gathering data for a few weeks) are completely useless.

I've installed the StatPress plugin, which looked somewhat decent. While that has now gathered roughly 150mb of data (600k entries), its reports are again completely useless. All I get are overview numbers that GA also provides, and various "latest" views, which again exclusively show those plugin pages, burying anything else.

What are my options to see the data I want, preferably using existing tools like GA or WordPress plugins?

Answer 1

In the Analytics profile that covers the whole site go to Content > Site Content > Pages and click Advanced next to the search input field. You'll find you can now specify a series of include/exclude filters based on url string matches (See picture below). Note that there is no hard limit on the number of filters you can apply.

Use these filters to narrow down the report to only the blog articles you're interested in, start with the blog root directory e.g. /blog/ then hit Apply and see if any pages you don't want remain in the report. You can then specify exclude filters to remove the unwanted pages. Keep doing this until you're happy with the results.

Make sure each new filter is based on the dimension Page.

Once you've applied the finished filter, copy the URL string for the report from the browser's address bar, scroll back up to the top of the page and click Add to Dashboard (you may need to create a new custom dashboard if you don't have one already).

Select the report display option suitable for your needs, click ok and you'll be taken to the new dashboard. Once there click the cog in the upper right corner of the new report widget.

You'll now see this screen:

Paste the URL you copied into the link to report url field and give the widget a memorable title. Adding the custom URL means that you'll be able to visit the report you just created again and again without recreating the filter from scratch. DO NOT change the graph type with this kind of report as you'll blank the filter criteria

You can create as may of these filters as you like, it's a very useful feature if you do a lot of custom analysis.

You'll find your widget on your custom dashboard under Home in the main navigation if you want to come back to it.