Going in and out of a number of wordpress instances that I manage I found this very useful wordpress plugin called wordpress.com Stats. It’s pretty decent to give you a quick indicator of the traffic you site receives. By no means is it exhaustive but if you see a decent amount of activity or an unnatural spike you can then know to pop over to Google Analytics or Omniture or your website analytics package you have gathering all the data. I simply use it as a stats quick view and have it placed on my wordpress dashboard in the upper right corner. You can locate the WordPress.com Stats plugin at the url http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

According to the plugin site, “Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.”

I’ve found it to be a quick install and the developers are pretty proactive with keeping it up-to-date and backwards compatible.