statcounter.com

For anyone with a website or weblog it's important to know where your visitors are coming from, how many you are getting and how they are viewing your site. Why is this information important? Because without this information how do you know you are reaching the people you want to reach, have designed your site for the right browsers and if your site is even being viewed at all. This is where statcounter comes in.

What is Statcounter.com?

Statcounter is a free invisible web tracker with detailed visitor information.

Setup

Setup is easy , just register for an account with their simple form and place the automatically generated code onto your web page or blog template. Once you have an account you can add more sites and track them independantly

Reports

Statcounter provides a large number of reports the most useful include:

Summary - This displays in a graphical format the number of pageviews, unique visitors and returning visitors to your site over a period that you can specify.

Recent Visitor Activity - This shows in descending order each visit to your site, with the following details, date and time, entry page, exit page, geographical location, referring url and browser information.

Country/State/City/ISP - This gives a breakdown of where visitors are coming from and their ISPs.

Browser - Pretty self explanatory, this is a breakdown of the browsers used to view your pages, this can be useful for making sure that the design of your pages is suitable for the browsers being used.

Came From - Shows how visitors got to your site in the first place.

There are many other reports and graphs available, the only limitation with the free account is that it only holds the detailed information for the last 100 pageviews, but if you regularly check your stats this shouldn't be a problem.

Conclusion

Statcounter offer a free fast and up to date service, there are others around that can do the same thing though. If you want to have a history of all your stats then you will need to upgrade your account and pay a small fee for a larger log size. For me though it offers all that I need. I have found it very useful for seeing where my traffic is coming from therefore being able to change things on my site where necessary.