We have two quick announcements about new Stats features. The first one affects everyone with a WordPress.com blog. The second is just for those who have marked their blogs Private.

The WordPress.com Admin Bar (visible at the top of your screen if you are logged into WordPress.com) now shows a tiny stats chart called a sparkline. You will only see the sparkline on your own blogs. Here’s a screenshot of my admin bar:

Admin Bar with Stats Sparkline

The chart consists of 48 upright bars representing the last 48 hours of page views for the current blog. Darker lines indicate nighttime according to the blog’s time zone setting. This is just to give you a rough overview of recent activity. The chart is also a link to the Site Stats page so you’re that much closer to the full picture. The sparkline has been available to self-hosted WordPress.org users through Jetpack for several months.

Private blogs, which can be viewed only by users chosen by the administrator, now track the page views of all of their users. Traditionally we have omitted the views attributed to a blog’s own users because stats were meant to reflect the activity of the general public. However, this meant that private blogs had no useful stats reports. This change will be especially useful for private blogs that have many users.

How are your stats looking today? To get those numbers moving, check out Scott’s recent post on How to Get More Traffic.

Update: We increased the contrast and added a scale that appears when you place your mouse cursor over the chart.

Sparkline with Scale