Installing and Using Statcounter & Sitemeter

Photo by Irina Patrascu

This lovely photograph by the truly exceptional photographer, Irina Patrascu, carries the words of Goethe ‘I find the great thing in this world is, not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving’.  The compass beautifully captures this thought, and yes Irina, we all need to use a compass when we are lost!  In the vast seas and oceans of the internet, it is so easy to be lost and hard to know if we’re headed in the right direction.  Measuring and monitoring the traffic to your site, gives you that necessary compass, that helps you to find your way and know for sure whether what you are doing is achieving the desired results.  So join me now, as I go through the process of how to monitor or measure traffic to your website / blog, and outline what has worked for me…

The Need for Website Traffic Stats

Very early on in any web / blog project, once you have got through the business of setting up your first few pages you soon realise that although you have created something quite unique which you are proud of, no one else knows about it.   You then go through a whole series of activities to work out how to tell the world about your new ‘baby’.   I won’t go through all the things I did, but it included submitting my site to the main search engines, registering on social networking sites, joining forums and creating backlinks.

I remember how excited I was to actually get some visibility of who was actually visiting my website.  This came about when I joined Blogcatalog and installed their widget in my sidebar.  The widget was fairly customiseable, and showed which members from Blogcatalog had come by recently, and I configured it to show the last 30 or so visitors.  It was always nice to see the returning visitors avators/icons, and how recently they had visited.  In it’s own way it kept me pretty busy touting for friendships on Blogcatalog to try and increase my returning visitors.   But, over time, this became a very time consuming process, as I tried to keep my Blogcatalog visitors actively returning for more content.

The reason for recounting this story now is to make the point, that without measurement you have no idea of the success or failure of your efforts. Even though the Blogcatalog widget was a rudimentary view, for the first time I had some visibility of who was visiting my site.  We need this measurement, this ability to monitor and track visitors to our sites, to give us an idea of whether we are on the right track or not.   The two programs I have used, and indeed still use are STATCOUNTER & SITEMETER.  They are both online web-traffic monitoring tools, both are free to use and have sufficient features for my purposes.  You can also buy and update your installations for more features if you choose to do this at a later date.  So, lets take a closer look at both of these now.

Installing and Using Statcounter

To get Statcounter, you will need to go to their website here:

http://www.statcounter.com/

The website has a link for a live demo where you can try out all the options, and see whether you like it or not.  To use it, all you need to do is register for a free account and install a small snippet of javascript code on your website, I have put it at the end of my ‘footer.php’ template file, just before the ‘/body’ label which marks the end of the html code on your web page.

When you register, you have to set up a project for each web-site you want to monitor and install the code on every site for tracking purposes.  It’s pretty easy to do, but once it’s set up and working you start seeing what’s actually happening on your website.

We now have visibility of traffic to our site, in an easy to understand graphical form which displays page loads, unique & returning visitors.  Now you have some data, and this information will help you understand the effect of your website postings and all your other promotion efforts.  This is important, because you can use this to gauge the popularity or otherwise of what you’re doing.

The other nice options with Statcounter are:

• The ability to see where your visitors came from, gives you a broader picture than just the single view you get from the Blogcatalog or Mybloglog widgets.
• Keyword Analysis tells you what people typed into a search engine to get to your website.  This is probably one of the most important reasons you will want to get stats from your sites, because this information shows you the effectiveness of your Search Engine Optimisation efforts.
• Visit length, tells you how long people stayed on your site!!!

Here is an example piechart showing visit lengths:

For me Statcounter provides a quick summary of whats happening on my site in an easy to understand graphical format, and it’s one of the things in my toolbag for website development.  Go and check it out, try out the online live demo, and if you like it, just use it!!!

Installing and Using Sitemeter

I use another software called Sitemeter on my Videodippers website.  You can get it here:

http://www.sitemeter.com/

Again, Sitemeter has an online tour of their software which you can try out.  To install it, just register for the ‘Site Meter Basic’ offering which is free, install a small piece of code which displays their small icon (you can see it on the Videodippers site, at the footer section, next to the CommentLuv icon) and thats it really.

Once you’ve got a few days stats, that’s when things get interesting.  Sitemeter gives me a lot more granularity regarding the traffic I am getting and where it is coming from.  It gives me a different perspective to Statcounter and a useful view on ‘referrals’ to my website.  For a site like Videodippers, I’m much more interested in what people are typing into Google or other search engines to find my site, less so about people coming through for social network and forum sites, and Sitemeter gives me a good view of this.

Conclusions

If you looked at the example piechart for visit lengths produced by Statcounter, you will agree with me it’s not a pretty picture really, 66.3% visitors left after 30 seconds.  Ok, I know the data needs more analysis with regards to sample size and which visits are being counted.  However, this sort of information, throws real light on what you’re doing, and sometimes the truth is not pleasant to read!!! But, without this knowledge you will always be in the dark, without a compass to steer you in the right direction, and being blind in a world where everyone else can see is n’t a good place to be!

That’s all for this post.  I would be interested in your comments on the article, whether you’ve used either these or other online traffic monitoring tools and your experiences with them.

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