Triquetra Design

Posts Tagged ‘free website stats’

Like all webmasters I like to know how my websites are doing. And that means using website statistics. There are many free offerings out there but I wanted an alternative to Google Analytics. The service I finally decided upon was StatCounter. It’s not perfect, your log (in the free service) only holds 500 (the last 500 once you’ve exceeded 500) entries so it can be difficult to track long term page trends but I’ve found that that is no real biggie. Once your sites start to get significant page views (5000+ per day) it’s easy enough to see trends in the daily figures alone.

Compared to many free offerings StatCounter offers a lot of information. You get an overall summary, popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, where your visitors come from, where recent visitors come from, keyword analysis, search engine comparison, exit links, exit link activity, downloads, download activity, visitor paths, visit length, returning visitors, recent page load activity, recent visitor activity, recent visitor map, country, state, City, ISP, and browser usage. Not bad for a free service!

It’s easy and straightforward to sign up and they offer various flavors of installation code. I’ve found that the default code works wherever I have put it. Whether that’s on a standard html website or a CMS website. It works and it’s accurate. You can choose to have your stats public or private, you can have a visible counter or an invisible one. Personally I have always opted for private stats and an invisible counter but the choice is yours.

You can visit and/or sign up for StatCounter by clicking here.