Keeping track of visitors
In case you’ve missed the beginning on the series, feel free to check out parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.
Now that you’ve spent a ton of time building your site, writing quality content, and spreading the word you can’t wait to see how your site is doing, but you don’t know how. Well, that is what the post is all about. There are about as many web site stats solutions as there are Content Management Systems. So, how do you know which one to select? The decision isn’t that hard. It all boils down to what you want to know and how you want it presented.
There are so many different solutions for statistics that there is no way that I could know them all or even describe all the ones I know about. So, being the lazy blogger that I am I narrowed the list down to some of the more popular ones that I already know a little bit about.
First, there is Google Analytics which is what I currently use at MandLAdventures. Google Analytics is based off of Urchin and is a free service. One of its unique features its is ability to integrate adWords. This feature doesn’t mean that much to me because I don’t advertise, but it sounds like it could be useful for those of you who do. Analytics offers a ton of other stats and demographic information. It uses JavaScript to capture info rather than reading log files. One of the main drawbacks I’ve notices is the inability to track outbound links. Actually, it isn’t an inability because Analytics can do it and even has instructions on how to implement it. However, I haven’t been able to get it to work and it requires manually changing outbound links. Not cool. Other than that, I am pleased with the service and will probably continue to use it in the future, but who knows.
StatCounter is the second one. I’m not sure it is extremely popular, but I have used and know at least one other blogger who does. It too is free, the your limited to viewing the last 100 log entries with the free version. Not a problem, if you have limited traffic and regularly read your stats. StatCounter offers some nice features, many of them similar to Analytics. The main difference comes in presentation. The presentation of StatCounter is much more basic. Not so many nifty graphs and Web 2.0 AJAX effects, but the data is useful and pretty easy to read. Like Analytics, it requires a little JavaScript to be inserted into every page.
Mint is another wildly popular stat tracker. Unfortunately, this one is not free. It’s not that expensive either…only $30. I might pay $30 for it if i could use it on more than one site, but I can’t. I haven’t used Mint for my own site, but I have looked at the demo on the mint site and Sonspring.com’s publicly viewable stats. At first I didn’t like how everything was presented, but after looking at all the info it provides and seeing all the different ways it can be sorted it started growing on me and I kind of wish I wasn’t so cheap and would shell at the $30 bucks. Plus Mint provides more info than many of the other solutions, even Analytics. For example, you can see who is on your site right now and easily track downloads. Unlike many of the other solutions, Mint is self hosted and it is extendable through what is known as peppers (get it pepper mint lol). Peppers are features that are written by oter programmers. A drawback to mint is that it only supports PHP sites, not .NET.
W3Counter is like a free Mint wannabe. It offers a lot of the same info that Mint does. The presentation isn’t quite as nice, judging from the demo, but you must remember that it is free. I have considered using it for a little while to see if I would like it better than Analytics, but I just haven’t wanted to take the time to change my code. Remember, I’m a lazy blogger sometimes 
MeasureMap is another solution. It looks cool, but I haven’t been able to test it. MeasureMap is now part of Google and they are not taking any new users at this time. I believe that are working on some improvements and migrating it to Google’s system. From what I can tell and based on some reviews I’ve read, MeasureMap more of a blog friendly version of Analytics (which is more of a business focused tracker).
AWStats is an open source solution that is a bit unique. For one, it is open source. For two, it reads your log files, and for three it is self hosted. Of course, some of the above ones have some of those features, but this one has a unique combination. This one isn’t quite as easy to read and use in my opinion, but it does offer a ton of info. Because AWStats does read the log files rather than use JavaScript, page load times should not be effected which is a benefit for people who what to totally optimize their web page load times.
If you would like to do some additional reading about the stats I’ve described above checkout the following links for some good reviews: Google Analytics, StatCounter, Mint, MeasureMap, and AWStats. I couldn’t find a good review for W3Counter quickly, so I recommend checking out the demo.
A quick search of Google will reveal many more potential solutions.
Related Posts:
One Response to “Starting a blog (pt9)”
[...] Keeping track of visitors [...]