Statcounter: who's visiting your website? (statcounter.com)

Member Name: katew

Product:	statcounter.com
Date:	02/12/08 (355 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Customisable, easy to use

Disadvantages: See 'My Opinion' section of review

Most web hosts provide some statistics about the visitors to your site, but for more control, I use Statcounter - www.statcounter.com. There is a free version and some paid ones. I'm reviewing the free one as my sites have fairly low visitor levels at the moment, but the main advantage of the paid versions is they they will list a lot more visitors - the free one lists only the first 500 entries, or 250,000 page loads in any given month. The paid ones are in 3 levels, from $9 to $29 (US dollars) a month, depending on how many visitors/pageloads you need it to show - up to a maximum of 25,000 entries, or 15,000,000 page loads a month.

The site is very clear and easy to use, with explanations at various stages of how to use the statistics, and clear menus along the top (profile, account info, support, etc) and down the side (stats categories).

Signing up is pretty easy, then the next stage is to add a project. This is done with the following steps: first, you give your site a name, then enter its url (web address). You can then set various options, such as type of site, time zone, etc, and create a cookie which tells Statcounter not to list your own visits. You can also choose whether your hit counter is visible to visitors or not. The software then creates html code, which you copy and paste into every page of your site where you want visits recorded.

Once you have created the project, it is shown on a list on your main Statcounter page. Each item on your list has several options: view the stats, install code or customise settings, control user access to projects (where you can add or delete other users - useful for a group project), schedule email reports (I've never used this so don't know how efficient it is), or delete the project entirely. Any changes require your password. There are also columns showing a summary of your visitors: today, yesterday, this month, and total since the project began.

Now you can view your visitor statistics. If you want to make your site the best it can be, it's useful to know where your visitors are coming from, what browser they are using, etc. You can then optimise the site accordingly. Clicking on the view stats logo takes you to a bar chart showing visitors each day for the current month; these details are also shown as a list. You then have a side menu with lots of options which give you great detail about who is visiting your site.

Sections include:
Popular pages - this lists all your most popular pages in order of how many hits they have had.
Entry pages - shows a list, again in order, of which pages people are landing on when they arrive at your site.
Exit pages - ditto for which pages they are leaving from. This can be helpful if visits are not converting to sales - maybe there is one page where visitors are getting lost/confused and giving up?
Came from - this gives the link, if any, that visitors followed to get to your site - useful in knowing which of your links on other sites and directories are actually bringing in visitors.
Keyword analysis - shows which of your keywords are actually attracting visitors.
Search engine wars - this shows, in the form of a bar chart and a list, which search engines your visitors are using - mine shows Google, AOL, MSN, etc.
Visitor paths, visit lengths and returning visits - as the name suggests, this shows the path visitors take through your site, how long they stayed, and how many have visited your site before. Stats are shown in the form of a pie chart and a list in each case.
Country/state/city/isp - good for knowing how many of your visitors come from various areas, particularly if your site has a local bias.
Browsers - shows, in the form of a bar chart and list, which browsers your visitors are using. Since you should try to optimise your site for all the main browsers, this is useful in throwing up ones you may not have thought of.
System stats - another useful one for optimising your site, as it shows what resolution your visitors are viewing at, what operating system they are using, and whether they have javascript enabled. I have java buttons on my sites, so it is good to know that the vast majority of my visitors have javascript enabled!
Lookup IP address - all visitors are shown by their IP address (a marker unique to each computer), and you can change this to show the actual name/identity of the visitor. I have family members tagged in this way, so that I can see how many of my visitors are potential customers, and how many are family just checking how my site's looking.
Finally, you have the option to download the statistics, either as an Excel file, or in CSV format, which stands for comma separated values, and can be used, for instance, to send bulk emails. Thus, you could email all your visitors to notify them of updates or offers (except that you'd probably be shooting yourself in the foot, as this would be considered spam!).

In most of these sections, there is the option to 'drill down', ie to get further information about the visitors. For example, say you found that most of your visitors were using Firefox 2 as their browser. You could then 'drill down' and find out the IP addresses of those visitors and what screen resolution they used.

My opinion
As I have said, most web hosts provide some statistics, but they vary in detail and are not usually very customisable. For webmasters, Statcounter provides a huge range of very useful statistics, which you can use to tailor your site much more closely to your visitor demographic. There are a couple of downsides: one is that, to stop it recording your own visits, you create a blocking cookie, which lists your own IP address as an exception. However, many computers have a dynamic IP address - that is, it changes for each session on the computer - and Statcounter doesn't seem to be able to block these, so your visits are actually recorded even if you've created the cookie. The other is that if you have a large site (one of mine has over 300 pages), it can be a right pain in the whotsits putting the code on every page. I've actually only put it on the main category pages for this particular site!

Summary: A very useful tool for webmasters