As part of my daily routine, I check in on this blog to the blog statistics found on the WordPress.com Dashboard. There, I can check only vague information like how many visitors, what search engine keywords brought them here, the most popular posts, and the most popular referals. Back on the Dashboard, I check for Incoming Links, to see who is linking here. If I have time, I will also check my SiteMeter account and Alexa to see how this blog is doing, but I usually do that once a month rather than daily.

On my main site, I get a lot more statistics to mull over, but it got me thinking about which statistic means the most, and which statistic should get most of my attention. Then I stumbled upon ProBlogger’s Which Statistic is Most Crucial to Your Blogging and this gave me a new perspective on my statistic investigations.

Darren Rowse asked the question:

“If you could only check one statistic on your blog what would it be?”

Note - I’m not talking about what statistics package (ie Sitemeter, Google Analytics etc) - I’m talking about one statistic from any such stats package.

Would you want to know visitor levels, your adsense total earnings, affiliate commissions, page views, referrers, outgoing links…. etc?

From among the comments starting to be generated, it appears that page views, unique visitors, and referals are top of the list. People seem to say the same thing: They want to know how many people are visiting, where they are coming from, and what are they looking at.

Still, it begs the question. If you could only check one statistic on your blog, what would it be? And if you are a WordPress.com blogger, are you getting the statistics that matter to you? Are there some statistics you would like to see added here? What do you think?

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