(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:29 am)
I use StatCounter to track hits on the site. They’ve got a great interface, and the service is free for a log size of 100. They can pull interesting statistics out of your site that a regular web log analyzer like Analog and Webalyzer tend to obfuscate because they’re just big lists of page hits. Statcounter, by comparison, allows you to track individual visit paths for the records in its log file. It’s pretty slick.
If you want more space than 100 entries, you have to pay $9/mo and up. So far I haven’t needed this, but traffic has steadily grown. Primarily, this seems to be due to growing awareness of the Lazy Image Layout WordPress image plugin, regional restaurant reviews, people trying to kill fleas with Borax, and the sudden popularity of Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi image searches. It’s fascinating to see what people are looking for.
No idea how many people are just reading the blog itself…maybe 10-20? That’s still pretty darn cool…thanks guys!
2 Comments
My question with StatCounter is this—does the log just mean the tracking of visitors, or is that also the counter and graphs? In other words, if the first visit tracked is on May 3, but statcounter was counting on May 1, will I still be able to see how many people visited/how many hits on May 1?
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Hm, I’m not quite sure what you’re asking, at to answer that would presume I knew exactly how StatCounter was working. The way StatCounter is installed is by adding a javascript to the pages that you want tracked; on every load, the script executes and sends whatever data it captures back (I’m assuming) to StatCounter’s servers, which compiles this information into daily reports. While they only keep the last 100 entries in the free version (you can buy more log space), they do keep track of the daily counts in terms of page loads. The detailed tracking history, though, is limited to what they have in the “last 100” log, but the information is pretty detailed and they can track per-user.
The StatCounter site has far more information than I can provide. I’m using it mostly because I like how the back-end shows what’s going on in a more browseable form than, say, Webalyzer or Analog. I haven’t tried other services like HitCounter, though, to make a call whether StatCounter is the best solution for a given scenario.