Hit Counters and Stats

Keep it to yourself.

Opinion page by Duane Alan Hahn.

Most hit counters only count how many times a page has been accessed, not how many unique visitors it has had. If one person visits the same page 10 times, that's not 10 different people. Hit counters are basically useless and they make a site look amateurish. You don't want to give people the wrong impression, especially if you have a business site.

Stats

If you really want to know how many people are visiting your site, stats are much better than hit counters. You can also find out things such as what search engine terms were used to find a certain page, what sites are linking to you, how long people are staying on your site, how people navigate through your site, and much more.

There are many stats services out there. The free ones usually require that you put their logo or an ad on each page that you want tracked. The main problem with stats is that the code can slow down the loading of your pages, especially if their site becomes unavailable for hours or days. Since they rarely write their code so it will stop checking after a reasonable amount of time, it can bog down your site so much that it basically becomes unusable until their site is online again.

The Best Stats

My favorite stats, Web Site Traffic Report (image used with permission).

My favorite is Web Site Traffic Report (WSTR) because you get a lot of info about each visitor displayed on the same page, including referrer, path through your web site, how long they stayed on each page, and when they come back to a page from visiting a link. Just check out their "Detailed Listing of Day's Visitors" under 'Sample Reports' and you'll see why I love these stats so much. If you don't want pop-up ads and their logo on your pages after the first month, you'll need to pay for it.

Although WSTR is great, it's just too expensive for most personal sites or small business web sites that are even slightly popular because it will cost hundreds of dollars a year. So, until I can afford WSTR stats, I use a log file analyzer.

Log Analyzers

If you have access to your log files, you can use a log analyzer to read those logs and usually get a second-rate version of what WSTR provides. A log file analyzer will be more affordable since it's only a one-time fee, but one look at WSTR's Detailed Listing of Day's Visitors will quickly convince you that although log file analyzers are good for some things, most of them just don't measure up when you want to find out how a person navigated through your site, how they found your site, search engine keywords, and various other useful things displayed all on the same page for easy access and maximum clarity.

I've tried many free, light, and trial versions of the most popular log analyzers out there and most of them are worthless to me. They don't display what you need to know about your visitors (if you want to make real changes based on your visitor's actions). Pay log analyzers and free ones such as WebLog Expert Lite are great if you want to check for hotlinkers and various other things, but for results that show exactly what pages each visitor is interested in and how they navigate through your site, nothing beats WSTR. Web Log Storming comes pretty close though. It's the best web log analyzer I have tried so far.

Monkey See, Monkey Don't

You might say, "but I've seen hit counters on business web sites, so hit counters must be great." Yes, it's amazing how many little rinky-dink business sites have hit counters, but you will hardly ever see a hit counter on any of the big sites. It's best to ignore any business site with a hit counter because anyone who has been on the Internet for more than a nanosecond should know better.

Stats and log file analysis can help you tailor your content based on the actions of your visitors and what search engine keywords they used. Besides the fact that hit counters are amateurish looking, no one with even a drop of common sense would want to hand over traffic information to their competitors. It's silly, and if a business site does that, what other poor choices are they making?