I am a stats junkie when it comes to my various blog’s traffic. I like seeing those numbers go by of people stopping by to read something I’ve written. I especially liked seeing that a month after the rebranding experiment that Shooting at Bubbles was already up at around 15,000 uniques for the month. The problem is that the tools available for bloggers – especially those of us who can’t let a day go by without seeing what is happening – run the gamut of overly simple to overly complex.

The thing to remember – especially if you ever want to go the advertising route – is that you need a rock solid way of collecting your stats that is recognized by ad networks and others that might be interested. So no matter how many different types of stats programs you play around with you should always have one that is you baseline stats collector.

For me I have decided that Google Analytics (GA) will be that baseline. I have used GA in the past but I was always looking for something better because I never really wanted to wait until the next day to find out what my traffic had been like. Like any normal stats junkie I wanted to know what was happening right now so I would install some new stats plugin or sign up for some new service – trying to find that right stats high.

Through this searching for the right stats program I learn myself the importance of my recommendation of having a baseline stats program because I have no real good long term stats for any of my blogs at this point. Hence the implementation of GA and then ignoring it – let it do its job and find something light weight to handle the real-time stats addiction part of the problem.

Now I had been using Woopra and don’t get me wrong it is a great product but the fact is that is more than I needed. Over the last while that I have been using Woopra I have liked it as a beta product, however as a baseline collector I felt it didn’t at this point have the same name recognition that Google Analytics did. When it came to the light weight presenting of daily data it just seemed to be too much for what I needed.

So I decided to return to Clicky but this time with a Pro subscription account so that I could monitor all my blogs as the free one only lets you monitor one blog. Now I can have daily stats activity off in a small Chrome window on the desktop and not worry about yet another application running. There are other really good options if Clicky doesn’t suite your needs and more coming along all the time. So as long as you have a good reliable baseline of stats being faithfully collected you can play around as much as you want.

As always it boils down to finding the best mix of tools for the job that works for you. In this case for me it is a mix of Google Analytics and Clicky – for you could be something totally different. That’s the fun part of being able to play around with all this software.