Keeping track of hits using StatCounter…
One of the applications that I use that sits quietly in the background and does its stuff is StatCounter. The StatCounter site allows you to set up counters for all your websites and then silently monitors all the activity to them. I primarily use it with WordPress to monitor my blog. I will give you one caveat though before I praise the product in general. At present it doesn’t hook up / sync up 100% with WordPress and so doesn’t capture all visits to my blog. What I mean by that is that it seems there are more page reads to my blog than those captured by StatCounter. How do I know this? Well I use the WordPress plugin called CyStats too. CyStats is purpose built for WordPress but doesn’t have a lot of the ‘frilly’ features that StatCounter has. Nonetheless, CyStats does record every visit to my blog, from both page views and feed views. Hmmm. I’m thinking there’s some room for improvement in two products here!
Anyway, this post is about StatCounter and I don’t want to detract too much from its excellent functionality. I also use it on one of my other sites PaulDorset.com (my author website) and for that site it works brilliantly. So, what does it do? Well it’s pretty self-explanatory really. StatCounter simply records every piece of information it can about every hit to your webpage or website. Then it allows you to view all that information in a number of different ways.
The main display screen shows you in graphical format just how many people have been cruising your site. You can configure the graph in a number of ways and show information by day, week, month, or year. It’s nice to see visually who’s dropping by for a visit.
Another feature I really like is the ability to view visitors on a map of the world. You can zoom in, click on individual entries, and do lots of interesting things. You can even zoom in to a street level address and see how often your neighbors are reading your blog!
Need to see your information in text format? No problem. StatCounter can also do that for you very well too. I even found out that one of my readers was using their T-Mobile G1 phone to read hints and tips on the G1 from my blog! It’s a funny old world.
If you’re interested in seeing some of the other types of information that are available to you then you can read the entries on screen capture opposite. As you can see, the options are very extensive.
Of course the alternatives for creating the actual display of the counter to show on your webpage are also very comprehensive. You can create all sorts of counter types and choose how to display them on your page (or not). You just embed a small piece of code and it’s done.
So, if you’re currently using a simple page counter on your page, or maybe not using one at all, I would definitely recommend a switch to StatCounter. You don’t know what you’re missing when you don’t have something!
