Tracking my Website Stats

When you place a small piece of html code on your website, and someone visits your website or a certain page of your website, that small piece of code records the visitor's public details (ip address, browser, operating system, referrer, page title and url etc) and analysizes the information and stores it for reporting to you later.

The great advantage of web trackers are that they are better at tracking 'real people' as they track browsers NOT server requests. This often means a web tracker will have a significantly lower count than standard log file analysis. But it offers a more realistic figure of the visitors to your website and far more detail. At StatCounter their web tracker is provided in real-time so it's even better still and it's free, other companies may charge a small fee.

A web tracker also records your visitors if they return to the same page twice or more. This does not happen with log files. Your page would be already cached in your browser. No request would be sent to the server. That user activity would go unreported. Thanks to web trackers and their use of a random javascript number - your counter is forced to load each time and your visitor is tracked.

As web trackers only track 'real people', it is not able to tell you when a search engine spider is indexing your website. For information like this you need a good log analyser.

With StatCounter to only track the pages you want by simply placing it on the pages you want to track. Log file analysis will track all server requests by default.

If you have very large, slow loading pages it is recommended to place the tracking code closer to the top of the page instead of the bottom. Or a visitor may exit your page before the page finishes loading and the tracking script will never have been loaded.

Web Proxies - many users, most noticeably AOL users access the web through a web proxy. Their ip address can change on each request to your website so log file analysis could not accurately count your unique visitors. At StatCounter, they do both - they use a simple cookie and the user's ip address.

StatCounter offers the following stats Configurable Summary Stats, Magnify User, Drill Down, Popular Pages, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Came From, Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity, Search Engine Wars, Visitor Paths, Visit Length, Returning Visits, Recent Pageload Activity, Recent Visitor Activity, Country/State/City Stats, Recent Visitor Google Map, ISP Stats, Browser Stats, O.S. Stats, Resolution Stats, JavaScript Stats, Email Reports, Multiple Site Management, Public Stats.