WordPress.com Stats API

WordPress.com has a very nice stat plugin showing the overall post views data and also post by post, but it would be always great if there was more. A lot of people talk about introducing Google Analytics. A lot of people save the data offline by copying the summary tables into files to save the site data. I had an idea to process the data of my site a bit differently and find trends in the data. I thought except copy-pasting the site summary data, there should be a cleaner manner to store the data. First I made a brief Google search, then made a wordpress.com forums thread. Then i had a short chat with Mark in wordpress.com freenode IRC and was redirected to wp.com email support. The first result came from email support telling that there is no data export feature. But another email followed to correct the previous one which told about the wordpress.com stats API with which you can get your wordpress.com site’s stats data in CSV or XML format.

The thing

You can get the wordpress.com stats API here : http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php
When you visit this page you would get a list of GET parameters with which you can generate different queries and get different data as per your needs. For example, post specific data, data between certain time or completely as a whole etc.
To use this API you would need your wordpress.com API key which you were assigned when you first registered. You can get your wordpress.com API key from Akismet Here : https://akismet.com/resend/

Here is the summary of the GET parameters to the link (from http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php)
Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Details
api_key	String	A secret unique to your WordPress.com user account.
blog_id	Integer	The number that identifies your blog. Find it in other stats URLs.
blog_uri	String	The full URL to the root directory of your blog. Including the full path.
table	String	One of views, postviews, referrers, searchterms, clicks, videoplays.
post_id	Integer	For use with postviews table.
end	String	The last day of the desired time frame. Format is ‘Y-m-d’ (e.g.2007-05-01) and default is UTC date.
days	Integer	The length of the desired time frame. Default is 30. “-1” means unlimited.
period	String	For use with views table and the ‘days’ parameter. The desired time period grouping. ‘week’ or ‘month’ Use ‘days’ as the number of results to return (e.g. ‘&period=week&days=12’ to return 12 weeks)
limit	Integer	The maximum number of records to return. Default is 100. “-1” means unlimited. If days is -1, limit is capped at 500.
summarize	Flag	If present, summarizes all matching records.
format	String	The format the data is returned in, ‘csv’ or ‘xml’. Default is ‘csv’.

The mandatory parameters are the api_key, blog_uri or the blog_id. Note that you need to provide either the blog_id or the blog_uri . The post_id is the one which is assigned to each post. You can get the post ids from your post dash board by inspecting the post edit link.

The table parameter can take one of the 6 strings: views, postviews, referrers, searchterms, clicks, videoplays. The views parameter gets the overall views per day of your blog in (date,views) format. The postviews parameter gives you stats is (date,post_id,post_title,post_permalink,views) format. The referrs shows stats in (date,referrer,views) format. The searchterms gives stats in (date,searchterm,views) format.

You can also get a post specific stat with the post_id parameter. Provide here the post id and make the table parameter to postviews. This will fetch stats for that post in (date, views) format.

You can specify the number of records to return with the days parameter. Also the period parameter lets you select the to return weekly or monthly stats. Like if you set period=week then the query would return the visits in (week of year, vist) format. Similarly setting period=month would return the month wise visits. You can get stats upto some specific dates with the end parameter.

By default the queries return in CSV format, but you can get the results in XML format by setting the parameter format to format=xml

For example

• To find the visits to your blog in last 100 days:
  Query: with table=views, days=100

  http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php?api_key=abcdef123456&blog_uri=http://yourblog.wordpress.com&table=views&days=100
  

• To get day wise views to your blog since its birth in XML format
  Query: with table=views, limit=-1, days=-1, format=xml

  http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php?api_key=abcdef123456&blog_id=0&blog_uri=http://yourblog.wordpress.com&table=views&limit=-1&days=-1&format=xml
  

  Note that in this query the limit of the days returned is 500. If you set the days to -1 and limit to -1 then the limit is capped to 500 (as per the table).

• To get visits since beginning of the blog till this day grouped by week&
  Query: with table=views, period=week, days=-1, limit=-1

  http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php?api_key=abcdef123456&blog_id=0&blog_uri=http://yourblog.wordpress.com&table=views&period=week&days=-1&limit=-1
  

• To get the summarized total visits till now use the summarize flag and days=-1

  http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php?api_key=abcdef123456&blog_uri=http://yourblog.wordpress.com&table=views&days=-1&summarize
  

  To get summary for some other date range adjust the end , days parameters.

For all the queries set your api_key, blog_id and the blog_uri . You need to provide the parameters separated by &

Pardon me for these horrible queries, these were just a demo to show how it works, you have to work out the other stuffs and how you can make it work as per your requirement. Also have a look at this for some more info http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/API_and_demo_application_for_accessing_Wordpress_statistics

I hope this would help a lot of people wanting to get their stats offline, or access the wordpress.com blog stats with their application.

The Email

Here is the email i sent to wp.com support and the reply

My Email

Hello,
I was thinking about a feature which is the availability of the past data of a blog in a downloadable CSV or a Spreadsheet format. I posted about this in the forum but there was no answer. Optionally how about including a regression curve, most preferably a line which indicates the overall progress of the blog in a daily , monthly and yearly basis along with the existing stats. The existing stats gets a good overview. But if there is a regression line through the data points then it would be great to see the progress at a glance. I asked about this in the wordpress.com IRC channel to Mark, he told me to email wordpress.com support and ask this email to forward to Andy, who is behind the wordpress.com stats programming.

Reply1

Hi Arjon

If I understand correctly, you are talking about an option to export data from the Stats feature?

This feature is not currently available, but I will post your thoughts to our internal ideas blog. If enough people like it, it will eventually get added to WordPress.com

Please contact us again if you have any more questions.

—
Ran,
WordPress.com, Support

Reply2

Hi again Arjon

Sorry for misleading you here – when I posted to our ideas blog, another worker allerted me to the fact that we do already provide a way to export stats data to CSV, using a simple API:
http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php

You can see some examples for using this API here:
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/API_and_demo_application_for_accessing_Wordpress_statistics

Hope this helps!

—
Ran,
WordPress.com, Support