Saturday, April 09, 2005

[Tracking Visitors] Sitemeter or something else?

Let's get some kind of visitor tracker for this new site. I use site meter on my own blog. Is it the best option? We're looking for something free, with as much useful information as possible. Preferably something that is public so we can all have access to it for learning purposes. Any suggestions?

14 comments:

Owen said...

I like http:\\www.onestat.com

plus they are brits(!)

I have to say tat even though they improved comments, I still like Haloscan comments better than Blogger, too.

Owen

Lillie said...

I use Braveheart, being of Scottish ancestry, what else could I choose.

Suebob said...

Thanks Owen. I stuck the one stat on my blog and am busily counting visitors. Up to 2 so far...both me LOL

Alice said...

I use sitemeter. I find it very, very addictive. Site meter tells me who referred me to my visitors, and I've found new blogs by visiting the referring pages. The "which search word let to your website" function is a paid service, but I can easily find out what the search word was by looking at the referring pages, since it includes the search engine URL in its entirety with the search word right in it. Very addictive.

Molly said...

I started with Sitemeter, but in the past couple of months, I've added StatCounter and will soon cancel my Sitemeter account. StatCounter offers tons of tracking information--for free--and has been very reliable.

BBQ Junkie said...

thanks for the tip. i reviewed statcounter and it was much better than what i had been using for the last month, extremetracking. statcounter is so easy to use and no mandatory ugly logo to be placed on your blog.

Anonymous said...

It might be interesting to use a bunch, and compare their numbers. I've seen various people comment that they see different numbers from different monitoring tools.

Since I host my own site, my ISP provides a number-tracking service that tracks unique visitors, actual pageviews, "hits" (actual downloads, one for each picture), and data transferred (which is how they bill me). It seems reliable, but their "unique visitors in a month" is clearly just the sum of each day's totals. If someone visits me once a day, they count 30 times for the monthly total. I wonder how many others do that.

Sam said...

great idea derrick - i was beginning to think that myself. I'll start adding them all on when I can grab a spare moment.

Hopefully, I will be able to share the passwords or make them public so we can all look at them for the purposes of comparison and discuss them further in the future.

noizy said...

I use and would recommend both statcounter and sitemeter.

Owen said...

Derrick - good comment - I actually also have my own ISPs stats tracking (in two forms since they have two forms) so I do get a good degree of feedback regarding accuracy and tracking - all three methods pretty much agree as to the numbers which is one of the reasons I like onestat - also they do very nice charts that I like.

You are limited as to the reports you can get out in the free version and can pay if you want more.

By the way, you might also want to do something here on ISPs and paid hosting versus free ala blogspot etc.

Then there are design and template issues and all that stuff. I know my blog is plug-ugly, but I can't design to save my life. What it IS though is flexible, works well with multiple browsers and stays readable even on pretty small screens.

Oh yeah - adding google search - some blog platforms have it built in I know, but there are a few little hacks you can do to make the free google site search work out a bit better.

Another possible topic is XML/RSS feeds.

Owen said...

OK - I have to check out the stat counter recommendation - they look awfully detailed - I think I'll try them out head to head for a while.

Owen

Anonymous said...

I'm using StatCounter too and I heartily recommend it.

Anonymous said...

There are two key items about stat services that need to be addressed.

Most stat services do NOT count:

1) Direct Accesses (i.e. folks who actally type out the http address or folks who have your site bookmarked).

2) Syndication reads (i.e. folks who read your site via a newsreader of sorts).

The culmination of these readers can equal or even exceed the numbers that services such as SiteMeter give you.

Owen said...

OneStat actually does break the direct accesses out and you can often infer the syndication stuff (by looking at IP addresses)

But since I use feedburner for syndication, I can get much better direct stats from them anyway on that issue