Understanding Your Stats, Google Analytics, HubScore, and HubberScore

Your My Account page is the place to go to view your statistics on HubPages. You can find the link to your My Account page in the top right corner on HubPages. My Account statistics are provided for the following categories: hub statistics, your profile, earnings, photos, activity, following, and video.

In the Hub Statistics category, you can scroll through all your Hubs and at a glance see the HubScore, total comments, publication date, and the page views in the last day (a rolling 24 hour window), one week, one month and all time.

For more detailed stats you will need to visit your Hub (but not in Edit Mode) and click on the "stats" button near the top of the Hub (above the Hub title). Here you can see not only the total views but also the top traffic sources and sort these results by Day, Week and Month.

For more detailed analytics, we recommend setting up a Google Analytics account. Check out our Learning Center guide on Google Analytics for more information.

Google Analytics is another form of stats that you can receive for your Hubs. It is a free service offered by Google that provides detailed statistics for website owners. With an Analytics account your can view your unique and repeat visitors, location of the visitors, originating source of the visitor (what website the visitor clicked off of to get to your Hub), the keyword the visitor used to find your Hub, the duration of time a reader was on your Hub, and more.

Although, HubPages offers a great deal of stats that you can use to monitor your Hubs and account, Google Analytics is a great means to better your Hubs, especially by knowing what keywords have been giving you the bulk of your traffic. Since Google Analytics is such a great tool to follow your Hub stats, HubPages offers an area in your Affiliate Settings screen, as you can see below.

It's really easy to sign up for a Google Analytics account and best of all, it's free. All you have to do is follow these steps.

1. If you don't have a one, you will need to sign up for a Google Account. Otherwise, just sign into your account.
2. Once you're signed in, click the My Account tab at the top right of the screen.
3. Then click the Analytics link, and look for the Analytics Setting at the top left of the screen.
4. Once in your settings area, find the Add Website Profile at the bottom left.
5. Type "hubpages.com" and click continue. (Do not include the 'www')
6. After adding the HubPages link, a JavaScript code will populate. You do not need the entire code for HubPages purposes. All that you need is the Tracking ID, which is going to look like- UA-123456-7. Copy this code and go back to your HubPages account. When in your HubPages account, go back to your Affiliate Settings section via the Earnings tab and paste the Analytics Tracking ID into the appropriate box labeled Analytics and update the page.

Inside your Google Analytics account, you will be able to see different stats such as the following:

• The Content Overview section will show you a list of all of your Hubs with the number of page views and percent of page views for that Hub. If you have a large number of Hubs, you can click the View Report link for a full listing.
• Graphs that display the number of visitors you've experienced within a specifed timed frame.
• A Map Overlay showing where in the world your visitors are coming from, with the darker, highlighted areas showing where most of the visitors are from. You can click "View Report" for more details.
• The Traffic Source Overview shows how much traffic you have recieved from different search engines, referring websites, direct traffic, and other sources. You can click the 'View Report' link for more details about your traffic sources.

This analytics information can get as detailed as you'd ever want to get and can be a very valuable way to get a even better sense of what your Hubs are up to and what types of traffic they're getting. By using some of the information that Google Analytics shows, you can continually improve your method for publishing Hubs, so don't just look at it, learn from it!

HubPages has developed two ranking methods, which like the herbs and spices Colonel Sanders uses on his chicken, are shrouded in secrecy.

Algorithms are kept secret for a couple of reasons. 1) a company like HubPages doesn't want anyone else benefitting from their creativity and cleverness, a lot of time, talent and money is invested into developing an online ranking system that works, and 2) if all the parameters are known it makes it far too easy for the system to be gamed. Scammers and schemers are devious enough to work out how to game a system but not clever enough to do the right thing. So for the benefit of the honest folk, Hub staff don't reveal any of their trade secrets.

Not every Hub has the ingredients to be a perfect 100 HubScore. If that's all you seek for all your Hubs then you are going to be bitterly disappointed. There are benefits and more exposure for high scoring Hubs. But the yang to the yin is that a low score will penalize the wrong-doers.

Once you start Hubbing you'll notice that there are two very important scores that you should be aware of. These are HubScore and HubberScore.

All Hubs start at 50 HubScore. This will fluctuate (yes, it will rise up even if it has not been published, but there's activity happening on the Hub (from you) so hence the score moving) but if the content published is of low quality, this might push it under 40. Dipping under this threshold will cause all outbound links to made nofollow. Search Engines are instructed to 'not follow' through the link to check out the page it is going to. Spammers don't like that.

All your Hubs over 40 won't suffer the same fate, unless...

...you have a track record of producing low quality Hubs (not just the ones with duplicate content, but also ones that are practically empty) then it will start to affect your HubberScore.

If your HubberScore drops under 75 then ALL your Hubs will be nofollow (including those which are over 40).

This works as a great deterrant to spammers thinking about signing up and abusing the reputation that HubPages has worked so hard to establish. It also punishes the spammers who signed up anyway.

For more information about HubScore (including source links) check out the following Hubs: How Hubscore Works and What is Hubber Score?