StatCounter

What is StatCounter?

StatCounter is a part of the web analytics tools family, and is a web tracking service that enables you to get visitor analysis for your website, in real time, and across many websites. StatCounter is free (up to a point, more on that later), and you can take a look at their live demo, which is based on a real, online and active website that sells guitars.

StatCounter is a web tracker. A web tracker only tracks browser, not server requests. This means that web trackers (like StatCounter) show you a much truer picture of how many visitors your website has, and of course, what they do there. StatCounter is also in real-time, so you get even more detail into the traffic data. A web tracker, of course, only tracks ‘real people’, which means that you can’t see activities of Google spiders, for instance.

So what does StatCounter give you?

Detailed Logs

StatCounter has two levels of analysis. A standard website analysis report which consists of pageviews, unique vs. returning visits, popular content and so on, and a detailed report of specific visitors. The detailed report enables you to drill right down to what people are doing on your site page by page, action by action, and it is pretty resource intensive. The free version offers you 500 pageloads, and of course, you can upgrade to get more.

Summary Reports

You can see at a glance some vital web analytics numbers – pageloads, unique visits, returning visits and more. You can see, for example, the statistics for the first week of every month, or the last 8 weeks. You can also save these filters, so you can get back to them fast.

Zoom In

You can zoom in on specific visitors, to see the exact path they took through your website. You can see per IP, exactly what system they have, where they came from, and what they did on your site. Pages, time spent on each one, navigation summary, the works. This is a great feature to use if you are running a specific campaign targeted at a particular audience (say, all the people who signed up for your newsletter), as you can see the effectiveness, and what sort of content they are looking for.

You can take this a step further – StatCounter has the option to drill down into specific keywords, for example ‘web analytics tool’, and see all the users who have come to your website as a result of that keyword. You can then look at specific users to see where they have come from, and what content they were looking at. So you know that all people who came to your site after searching for ‘website analysis tool’ were looking for a list of tools – and now you can provide it to them.

Site Information

Of course, StatsCounter also gives you the standard data that any web analytics tool needs to provide. Geographical location of your visits, how long people stayed, what were the most-viewed pages, exit pages, keyword analysis, and more.

Pros:

  • Free, up to a certain number of visits

  • Easy to set up

  • Fully featured

  • Can drill down into data

Cons:

  • Larger websites will need to upgrade fairly quickly

  • Can’t set goals (for example, how many people signed up for the service)