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=100http://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=xmlhttp://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=-1http://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.phpYou can see some examples for using this API here:
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/API_and_demo_application_for_accessing_Wordpress_statisticsHope this helps!
—
Ran,
WordPress.com, Support
Wow. There is a lot to explore in WP.com stat plugin. That is a useful stuff. I didn’t know this earlier too. Thanks for sharing.
Ya definitely it is a great feature as you can get the raw data and then process as you wish. Thanks for stopping by.
Hmm, I really need to host my blog on a shared/dedicated server some time… These WP plugins are great! Especially this plugin is great! Nice post.
Why do you want to go for shared? This plugin is available already on your wp.com dashboard the stats. You can use this plugin to download the stats or use the stats somewhere else. I recommend staying with wp.com because it provides a lot of useful plugins and features. I have tried some other platforms and not have settled in wordpress.com , bought a domain and the domain mapping feature of wordpress.com
Oh, very nice! Thank you for pursuing this and even more so for writing it up.
A short writeup to make the fellow bloggers aware of this excellent feature. Thanks for stopping by.
Hi, thanks for your post!
I’m interesting getting stats to work in a multi site install and collect last weeks unique visitors for each blog…ending up in a toplist. Do you think it’s possible through the API?
Regards
Tomas
I haven’t worked with the wordpress.com API, but you can access the stats of different wp.com blogs owned by you and then operate on the fetched data. All the sites from which you will be fetching data should be owned by you, and you need to provide the API key of your wp.com account. With appropriate parameters to the API fetch the total visit of one day , month, or week, and then sort the fetched numbers and you can have a toplist. Give your API key in the api_key parameter and for each blog specify the blog links with the blog_uri parameter, and then fetch the visit stats as per your requirement. Checkout the post for it and also the API webpage. But wp.com API will not fetch unique visitor tracks with IP address, it just will get you the number of visitors. Note that because wp.com will not allow any kind of code to be run in wp.com servers therefore this toplist calculation needs to be somewhere else.
Thanks phoix!
Will do some tests…
Yep, let me know about your implementation.
Alakazaam-infromtaion found, problem solved, thanks!
Any chance to get AUTHOR data into the API? I have 4 writers on my “Self-Hosted” wordpress install and would like to pull it into my reporting system via CSV with Author in the table.
?
I am not sure about author information. As per the available arguments, I do not think that is possible. I am not sure if there are some update on the API. If your blog is self hosted then I am not sure if this API will be present, as this is only for the wordpress.com.
Hello, just found this post, i wonder is it possible to get the visitor data count from this method?
Hi, I recommend you go through this post
https://phoxis.org/2016/12/30/using-wordpress-com-stats-api/
I wrote this recently, this might answer your question. If not, let me know in the comment.
Hi, can i know there’s a way to get daily view per time? from the post just total view per day. Thank you.
As far as I know about this API, it only allows daily view and not on an hourly basis, if you are looking for that.