Widget-ize your stats!
This is an article for Mac users, since I don’t think “widgets” exist on Windows.
My brother showed me this fun trick, which he’s using to keep track of stats for an online journal: using Safari, you can take snippets of website and turn them into widgets.
- Using Safari, navigate to your Google Analytics page (and if I haven’t set one up for you, get in touch)
- Click the little scissors button to the right of the Refresh button.
- Now when you mouse over the page, different areas are highlighted. The most likely candidate for a widget is the “Visitors overview” graph, so highlight and click this portion of the page.
Highlighting my visitor overview graph in Google Analytics (pretty sorry stats I know...)
- Click the Add button at the top of the browser window. That’s it! Your dashboard comes up, and the new web clip is added, and will be updated constantly.
- Optionally, you can click on the tiny “i” in the lower right corner and choose a different look for the widget.
The graph widget-ized and in my dashboard (not actual size).
You’ll still want to check in on your Analytics page to look at traffic sources, etc. (tip: if you include the “View report” link in the widget, you can shortcut straight to that report by clicking on it), but this is handy and fun to keep tabs on your visitor numbers.
Of course, you can use this trick with any snippet of any web page you like.