If you’re like me, you’ve got tons of friends. Wilson, Wilhemina and their triplets from the farm over, Wade and Wallenda from the field across the way. And sure, they come visit my website, chat it up a bit and see what’s new in Woodie’s world.

But, when I check my stats, I see there’s been other people there too. People I don’t know.

This is a good thing.

Let’s find out what stats really are, and how they measure the people following us.

On your dashboard, go to Site Stats.

You can also view your stats by visiting your Sparkline

Now you’ll see a ton of windows open up. Let’s take a peek and see what’s up shall we?

First up is our graph of visits. You can choose by the little tabs at the top whether you view by days, weeks or months. The bottom left hand corner shows your total views, followed by how many views so far today, as well as your best day ever. I love those.

Next up is Referrers. Say that a few times fast, it always makes my tongue tangle in my incisors. A referrer is a site or search engine or blog that links to yours. When a person clicks on a link and arrive at your site, they’ve been referred, and it counts as a visit.

Search engine terms is how people find you via the search engines. In this case, someone found me through Carrie’s site, Smartass Romance. Sometimes it will say unknown, but that’s just a search engine that doesn’t like to give out it’s information. No biggie. Study these, because these words are how people find you. If it’s good words, like learn wordpress, then I’ll want to emphasize that phrase in further posts.

This one is pretty self-explanatory. The top pages and posts that people are viewing on your site. Again, check the top tabs – one is for today, and one is for yesterday. Today office pranks seems to be the spot to go. The office wrapped entirely in aluminum foil? Sheer genius. =)

Clicks? What on earth? Relaaaaaaax…Woodie will explain. If I have a blogroll and one of my links points to my old pal Wade, and YOU click on that link? It’s a click. If I have a link in one of my posts and you click on that? Yup, another click. It also counts links in my comments and even clicking on the commenters names themselves.

And now, for the grand finale! Followers is the number of people following my blog and/or comments. Spam shows how many Akismet has blocked – thank you Akismet! It also shows how many categories I use as well as tags.

Now depending on how your screen options are set up, you may have more or less items than I show in my window! But this here will give you an idea of who is coming to your blog, how they got there and what they’re looking at.

IMPORTANT! – Remember last week we discussed Jetpack? Well in the future, upgrades will only be made via Jetpack for site stats. You’ll still be able to get your stats, but eventually you’ll want to switch at the very least your site stats to Jetpack.

Take care my favorite peeps!