Jan 19 2008
Track Your Website’s Traffic In Real-Time For Free
For quite some time, I’ve been using Google Analytics for my WordPress-powered blog as my primary tool in tracking and analyzing my website’s traffic. It’s a free service (like other Google features) for site statistics and help site owners in their decision-making, site planning, and marketing. It benefits even more those site owners who avail user Google Adwords to increase their marketing, since that service works in conjunction with Google Analytics.
Recently, I found another free statistical tool that works similarly like Google Analytics. However, unlike Analytics, it does not work only as an invisible web tracker, but it can be configured to act as a hit counter too. It is also much faster and responsive, quickly loading than the Google counterpart. It accurately reports site statistics in real-time. The reportage includes popular pages, entry and exit pages, referring sites, keyword analysis, search engines, visitor information, paths and length, visitor map, among others.
It only takes four steps to get started with StatCounter. First, you need to register an account at StatCounter website. Then, you create a project for web tracking: it could be the whole website or just the major pages you want to comprehensively analyze. Finally, StatCounter gives you the snippet code that you just “copy and paste” to web page before the closing tag of the body. If you already experienced Google Analytics, you will observe that the application process is almost the same.
Bloggers who own sites powered by WordPress platform (like me) can also take advantage of StatCounter’s plugin. Like other WordPress plugins, this web tracker plugin is easy to install and use. Once it’s activated, it begins to track visitors from any page and reports more in detail the web traffic than any other WordPress statistics plugins.
Question: Can I put two web trackers on my web page? Yes. That is what I do with my websites. This website, for instance, is being tracked by Google Analytics and StatCounter. Each web tracker has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the weaknesses of one are complemented by the other. For Adwords users, Google Analytics may help you better in your web marketing; otherwise StatCounter offers more detailed web traffic report. The only minor rant I have with StatCounter free account is that its logs are limited to 500 entries only – but still enough for small to medium-sized websites or blogs. If you think your site is large, you can consider upgrading to larger log quota in various denominations. The cheapest upgrade is US$9 per month for 1500 log quota. But then again, I believe you’ll get the worth of your pay with StatCounter.
Click here to visit StatCounter website.
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January 19th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Beware of the WP plugin though. It broke my theme up into an unworking one. So I just manually inserted the coding for it.
There are two features I would like to see, they are links that are clicked within your site and any images that might be hotlinked from outside the site.
January 19th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
It happens to some themes. On some WordPress sites I managed, the “Social Bookmark” plugin I used here totally messed up the themes. Probably it is the same case as yours using the WP StatCounter plugin.
January 20th, 2008 at 12:56 am
If you want a free upgrade, try GoStats instead, it’s miles better than statcounter in every way.
January 20th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Ohh. That one has Clicks… Gonna have to take a look.
January 20th, 2008 at 3:39 am
Never mind. The one feature that I want and you have to pay for it. YEA RIGHT!
January 28th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
John, Google analytics does not show you real-time stats. It also fails at showing you all your visitors sometimes. It beats me how this happens, but it does.
Especially when you have huge amounts of traffic - Google simply chooses to ignore data that, otherwise, could be very important for your stats. I suggest you employ at least a second stats counter to refine your analysis.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
(PS: I didn’t notice stats counter)
January 28th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Yes Mig, Google Analytics does not show real-time stats. I was referring to StatCounter in the article.
This site is using StatCounter code, view the source and notice the code before the tag.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:11 am
Hi There,
Just came by your site searching for more infomation about web traffic info, and I found some great info here
I`m working on building the best! Viral Traffic site now so I do a lot of reviews all over the net.
Have A Great Day.
Regards,
Jack L
Viral Traffic Center.com
April 21st, 2008 at 5:45 am
Thanks John - this post has exactly the info I was looking for.
Cheers
April 21st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
You are welcome, Robin. I’m glad that this post has been useful.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:28 am
Pretty good article. I like it, keep it up.
April 26th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Thanks Digital SLR. It’s good to know that this post have been useful to others.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
I think that was a pretty good post. I couldn’t do it
. Keep up the good work.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:57 am
Thanks for identifying this plugin I can try with my Wordpress blog to track traffic in real time for free. It is very cool that StatCounter also can work as a hit tracker.
June 20th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Thanks for the great review,
i have been a long time user of analytics, but what bugged me is the fact i need to wait for at least a day until i see decent results….i think i will give this new tool a try, it looks good…can i run it in parallel to analytics? or it will slow my site?
July 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Very interesting blog, thanks for the info.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Nice post, more like this please,
Can I use this in my blog?