Can you answer any of the following questions about your website stats? * How many people visit your website each month? * What pages are most popular? * Which blog topics generate the most traffic? * Which articles do people spend the most time reading? Knowing the answers to these questions makes attracting an agent or publisher easier. They will ask about your website stats, and if you don’t have the answer, you will look like an amateur.  If you plan to indie publish, knowing the answers to those questions will help you sell more books. Website statistics tell you if your website is working or irritating readers, and you’ll gain readers by thrilling them rather than irritating them. The key to effective marketing is to measure. Your website is the hub of your online book promotion, and if you don’t have good website data, your data on other promotional efforts won’t be as useful.  How do you get good stats for your website?  In this article, I’ll recommend two tools to generate stats about your WordPress website. They work together like your eyes. With both, you can see clearly, but even one working eye (or web data tool) will save you from blindness.  Many of the older analytics tools such as Monster Insights and Exact Metrics have become far less useful in recent years, so I no longer recommend them. They have become terrible tools, and any useful data will cost you $400 per year. That’s not worth it for most authors, especially when similar free or almost free options are available. Tool #1: Jetpack What does Jetpack do?  Jetpack is the Swiss Army Knife of plugins. It replaces the need for at least half-a-dozen other plugins, so I’ve fallen in love with it. Although it went through an awkward adolescence, it’s now a mature tool that almost every website needs. It’s been drastically improved and has become more powerful with these features: * Stats * Speed Boost * Contact Form * Related Posts   * Security * Backups * Super Search Why is Jetpack important? Spam will ruin your blog comments if you don’t have a filter. Readers get frustrated when you don’t have a contact form, and if your site loads slowly, people will leave. Jetpack remedies these problems. Why is Jetpack the best? Jetpack is made by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. They have the best developers and the most money to fund their development. If you install the other plugins we’re recommending, the free version of Jetpack is all you need. Get Jetpack Most impressive of all is their new stats engine. When they notified their users, I immediately activated the new stats engine, and I am in love with how beautiful and simple the stats are. Many authors install Google Analytics on their websites but don’t know how to check or read the da...