Keeping Track of Your Blog’s Readers, Part 3: StatCounter
By 
Tyler •
August 15, 2008
A quick note before the good stuff: if you haven’t already, go back and read Parts 1 and 2 of this series: Part 1: Have a Mint, and Part 2: Google Analytics.
Of all the analytics tools we’ve taken a look at so far, it’s safe to say that StatCounter is by far the oldest. It’s been offering its service for over six years now, and they provided a valuable service the whole time.
Like most other offerings, StatCounter presents you with a main dashboard at the outset of the experience. However, this is the least comprehensive panel of the three services we’ve seen so far. Found on this page is a simple visitor-count graph only, as well as the corresponding chart below. There are also a group of settings used for customizing the scope and type of information.
There is something to say about the simplicity, though. It’s nice to not be overwhelmed with information as in Mint and Google Analytics, and StatCounter provides the bare essentials in reader information: it tells you how many you have. For a lot of bloggers, this may be all the information they really want to know.
For harder-core bloggers and the more curious sorts, there’s a great menu of details found on the right-hand side. There are over 20 other pages filled with various information. I’m sure they’re all useful to somebody, but many of them show information a casual blogger doesn’t care about. Many of the pages are non-essential (although I admit I had fun browsing through them), so I’ll point out the most useful pages here:
Popular Pages will, quite obviously, tell you which of your pages are the most popular. It’s a very basic view, simply a list of your top 20 most visited pages and their corresponding visitor count. Not much detail, but a good indicator of post performance.
Keyword Analysis is a great tool for finding out what keywords are sending people to your site. Again, this is just a simple list of the most common keywords that people use to get to your site. One quirk: it won’t say by default which search engine they’re coming from, although you can turn it on. Not too big a deal. They’re probably all from Google anyway.
Visitor Paths tells you what page visitors start at on your site, and then all the pages they visited before they leave, in order. This can be a great resource to see where you’re losing readers, how they’re going through your site, and help you make decisions about ways to keep them interested.
The Recent Visitor Map may not be the most useful tool, but it might be the most interesting and fun. It’ll display a nice big Google Map for you, with pins dropped on the locations of your most recent visitors. A great way to see where your visitors are. This might be useful if you, say, ran a sports blog, because it would tell you which teams you may consider focusing on for more traffic. Of course, if you’re not into the whole graphical-visualization thing, there’s also the Country/State/City/ISP view, which gives you the same information in more detail, in table view.
Finally, Download Logs won’t be for everyone, but if you’re the type that wants to pull down your visitor information and make your own chart in Excel or Numbers, this is the place for you. It’ll let you download a CSV file of your whole StatCounter record, which is great for slicing your data up in custom ways.
With any product, there are several downsides as well. For example, the StatCounter page feels to be full of advertising. Even though there are only a couple of well-placed ads, you’ll start to feel as though you’re sharing your readership information with the advertisers. There’s also a surprisingly large amount of happy talk to explain in great detail what each page is for, but I find it mostly useless. At least it’s at the bottom of the page where it’ll stay out of your way.
Overall, I think StatCounter is a great choice for anyone who values simplicity and minimalism. It gives you all the information you might want (through extra options) but the defaults are all very simple and easy to understand. Even with all the extra content, distractions are minimal and let you focus on your readers. Best of all, it’s free, so there’s not much reason not to at least give it a try.
I know I’ve been saying this would be the third and final part of this series, but I’ve been convinced to tack one more on. The next one will be a secret, though, so watch out for it next Thursday.
Popularity: 48% [?]
| 3.2 |
Thats what I use on all of my blogs, with no complaints.
Statcounter with a site of Analytics
StatCounter is really nice, especially since there’s an option to use an invisible tracker. I recently purchased some log upgrades.
BTW, I use Analytics and StatCounter to ensure that I can collect accurate stats.
I use statcounter for my blog and websites.. Excellent service with Excellent Features.
As for the advertising.. I have ad-blindness so it doesn’t effect me. Besides, they made the website.. Can’t they make a little cash off of it too?