When you activate Jetpack Site Stats in WordPress, the plugin will actively begin recording statistics of user visits. It will record different important statistics like the source of user visits, the landing pages or popular posts and other details. Those details are grouped by days, weeks, months or years. You can view them and analyze your traffic in great detail.
By default, the plugin is configured to record the statistics of only guests. It means that page views of logged in registered users are not counted. Your i.e. administrator views are not tabulated and it is a good thing as we normally don’t want our own page views in the mix. Additionally, other registered users with editor, author, contributor and subscriber roles also do not contribute to the visit logs.
This is one of the main reasons why there is a difference in reporting between Jetpack’s stats and external services like Google Analytics. Your WordPress site isn’t adding up views of registered people. While this is fine in most cases, there might be situations where you want to record the views of other registered members.
It may be true that you don’t want to keep the visits by administrators and authors, but you will want the page views of the rest of your visitors. This holds especially true if you have enabled member registrations and a good following or regular visitors who are actively accessing your content. Their activity should not be ignored in the main reports.
For that purpose, it is recommended to activate user statistics of members with certain roles. Here’s how you do that.
- First and foremost, you must have Jetpack site stats activated. Here’s the explanation of the plugin in detail.
- Go to Jetpack > Site stats to access the statistics page.
- On the top—right next to Site Stats—click the link that says Configure.
- In the configuration page, tick all the member roles for whom you want the stats to be recorded. The selectable roles are:
- Administrator
- Editor
- Author
- Contributor
- Subscriber
You usually want Subscriber to be checked. Some might prefer it to be up to the Contributor level.
- Hit the Save configuration button to keep the changes.
You will also see several options like putting a chart on the admin bar, displaying/hiding smiley face image (viewable in the footer area) and the members or member roles who can access the reports. Change those options as per your preference.