Author Stats Pro

About Author Stats Pro

Author Stats Pro is the ultimate tool for tracking author data and analyzing which authors provide the highest return on investment (ROI).

Indexing Posts

When you first activate Author Stats Pro, it will begin indexing your Posts. This means the plugin is running a resource-intensive job on your server to identify each eligible post and then calculates the stats for each post. It does this for every post that is in scope.

How long does it take? 

Depending on the number of posts on your site, this can take a while. How long? That depends on multiple factors such as:

1. the size and speed of your server. Shared hosts will be much slower than dedicated hosts.
2. the number of posts to be indexed. A site with 10,000 posts will take 10x longer than a site with only 1,000 posts.
3. the size of each post. Sites with posts that have 1000 words and many comments take longer than those with 100 words and near zero comments.
4. and/or hosting limitations. Certain managed hosts (i.e. WPengine and Kinsta) will limit cron jobs from executing on their servers. In such cases, you will have to send a request to your host to enable crons. This is a common request and your host will know exactly what to do.

In short, large sites may have to wait 1 – 2 days or more for all posts to finish indexing. Sit back, relax, Netflix and chill, get a coffee, or take a scenic drive.

How can I check the progress? 

1. You can check the progress at the top right during the indexing process. (see screenshot below – example: 11000 of 15434 indexed)
2. You can click – refresh status – to update the progress number.

Data

Author Stats Pro leverages your existing WordPress data to show stats. It retrieves comments and word count for every post in order to show total number of posts, total comments, total word count, and average word count for every author.

Number of Posts

The total number of posts by an author is calculated as the sum of all published posts by that user.

Comment Count

Comments are retrieved for each post from WordPress database.

Word Count

Word count is calculated based on the number of words within the body of the content for each post.

Average Word Count

The Average Word Count is calculated based on the Total Word Count / # of Posts by the Author.

View Count

Unfortunately, WordPress does not store view count data for a post, therefore Author Stats Pro must calculate and store this data instead.

For this reason, view count data can only begin collection when the plugin is first installed. There will be no historical view count data upon installation.

While Author Stats Pro does store view data, not all views are counted. To ensure view data count within Author Stats Pro is accurate and can be used to measure ROI, the plugin only counts views that meet these conditions:

1. The visitor is NOT an Admin. Google Analytics does not account for this.
2. The visitor is NOT an Editor. Google Analytics does not account for this.
3. The visitor is NOT the post’s Author. Google Analytics does not account for this.

To ensure our data is as accurate as possible, we performed a basic sanity check against Google Analytics for a couple of posts on our own blog and here are the results.

As you can see in the example above, the views from Google Analytics are 63 vs. 58 from Author Stats Pro. Almost all view tracking platforms will have different results, but since Author Stats Pro has these extra data checks, the view count data will be more accurate.

Below are some of the reasons why Google Analytics data may be different than the stats reported in Author Stats Pro:

1. Logged In Users – as mentioned above, we do not count views from logged in user roles such as the Admin, Editor, and the post’s Author.
2. Bot Traffic – Google Analytics filters out select search engines and other bots and spiders crawling your site.
3. Different Metrics – Different trackers calculate metrics differently. Their metrics may not be necessarily the same calculation. For example, Google Analytics counts multiple pageviews from the same user as a single session whereas other trackers may not. Hence, pageviews is not the same as sessions which is not the same as visitors.  Therefore, it’s important to compare apples to apples when trying to correlate such data.
4. Time Zone Settings – Author Stats Pro uses your WordPress timezone settings. Your Google Analytics timezone may be different which could further skew stats for comparison purposes. In other words, you have 1,000 visitors on Monday, and 500 visitors on Tuesday, but since if time zones are off, then those numbers for Monday and Tuesday will look considerably different when added to all of the other differences.
5. Analytics Views and Filters – Google Analytics allows you to create different views that can be used to filter data. If you are in a view that filters out data, then you’ll be missing that data in Google Analytics when comparing to Author Stats Pro.

Regardless, our benchmark for testing the accuracy of view counts is and always will be Google Analytics as it is the industry standard for such data. However, it is expected that view count will not be exact for one or more of the reasons stated above. 

All Author Stats

The All Authors Stats page displays an overview of all the users on your site (except those who cannot create posts). From this page you will be able to see every author’s views, comments, share count, average word count, and total word count. This table is sortable so you can easily see who is the top of each stat.

Single Author Stats

The Single Authors Stats page will give you an overview of all the posts an author has written. From this page you will be able to see which post has the most views, comments, share count, and word count.This table is sortable so you can easily see which post is the top of each stat.

Author Profile Page

We all know that authors would love to see their own stats on your site and we give them this ability.  Authors can now go to their profile page and view all of their stats.

Widget

Author Stats Pro has a widget to allow you to show off your best authors.  Here are some of the settings you can configure for the widget.

• Post Types
• User Roles
• Toggle displaying of certain stat
• Rank Authors
• Limit the number of authors shown.
• Date Range
• Avatar Size
• Avatar Shape

Shortcode

Author Stats Pro comes with a single shortcode that you can use to display the All Author Stats Page anywhere on your site.
[nnr_author_leaderboard]
Simply add the code anywhere on your site to show a list of sortable Author Stats.

Filter Data

Author Stats Pro allows you to filter the data returned.  Here are the filter settings available.

• Filter Metric – There are 2 options as site owners have varying needs and use cases.
  • Posts – when this option is selected, ONLY posts published within the selected date range will be included in the results.
  • Views & Comments – when this option is selected, ALL posts will be included in the results BUT ONLY Views/Comments received during the selected date range will be displayed in the results .
• Date Range
• Post Type
• User Role

Filtering by Date Range on the All Author‘s page will not affect share count. This is a limitation with the SharedCount API and we cannot retrieve shares per day.

Filtering by Date Range on the Single Author‘s page will only affect views and comments. Word count and share count are not date dependent and all posts will show regardless of date range.

Export

All data shown in the Author Stats Pro plugin is exportable and compatible with Microsoft Excel.  All filters apply to the exported data, so you can export any filtered data you like.

Settings

This is where you will be able to control certain functions of Author Stats Pro.

Shared Count API Key

Add your Shared Count API key to this setting and click test to confirm your connection with their API.

Use Shared Count

Enable this option to use the Share Count API and calculate share count data for every post.

User Role Visibility

This option allows you to enable and disable a user’s ability to see their own stats in their profile by their user role. Disabling Contributor will prevent all Contributors from seeing Author data in My Profile.

Reset View Stats

This option will allow you to purge the database of all views and reset them to zero. Only use this if absolutely necessary.