5 Web Stats Programs For You To Consider
It’s quite a regular occurance to be browsing through the Web, and come across a discussion or post about available stat programs for your website. Now this isn’t extensive, obviously. There a dozens of web stat programs available, but I thought you might be interested in some of those I’ve either used, or recently become aware of.
Personally, there are at least five things that a counter/stats program must have before I’ll even try it.
1. It needs to have the option of being invisible for free.
2. It needs to be hosted somewhere else and ‘light’, (in other words, I don’t want it slowing down my page load time.
3. I need to be able to block my own visits, as I don’t want stats to be inaccurate.
4. It needs to be accurate. For me, I’d rather have more visitors than I realise, rather than less visitors than I realise. Therefore, if stats appear a little bloated, I’ll go for something else.
5. It needs to tell me where people are clicking through from, and how long they stayed.
There are of course many other things I could mention, but those are probably the most vital for me. Let’s consider five different programs.
StatCounter
Now for a long time I’ve been a user of StatCounter. When I first started looking for web counters, the most prominent were StatCounter and SiteMeter. However, the latter didn’t have the invisible option, and so I went with the first. It has served it’s purpose well. It’s quick, and easy to use, but it does lack some of the deeper stats others offer.
Google Analytics
Although the graphs aren’t as pleasent, and some details aren’t there, I have stuck with StatCounter for the past year, rather than move to Google Analytics. GA seems to slow down the loading time of my sites. I may be wrong, but that’s the feeling that I get. Plus, I just don’t like the GA interface. It’s badly designed, and not user friendly, which makes it completely opposite to StatCounter. This has put me off, but there’s no doubt it’s one of the best free options out there.
Pmetrics
Another option I’ve been trialing recently, is the offering from Performacing. Now in my opinion, their Pmetrics has a lot to offer. Their results are almost identical to what I get from Statcounter which gives me confidence in it, but it’s displayed a lot better. On the one page you can view the uniques, page views, and average time spent on every day for the current month. Tracking where people have come from, where they left, and all the other stats you’d want, is simple because the interface is straightforward and well designed.
One of the best options however, is the ability to integrate Feedburner stats to be tracked by them too, and you can get your stats sent to you via RSS - how cool is that?
Reinvigorate
For those of you that don’t know, Reinvigorate is still in Beta, and I can only comment on it because I received a direct invite this morning. Put simply, it’s really nice, light, fast, and although it’s early days, I’m very impressed. It shows graphs for hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly. What I like about the monthly graph which is better than Statcounter and Pmetrics is that, rather than going from the 1st - 30th, it shows the last 30 days; so that might be from April 14th - May 14th.
It has loads more, and I think I’m sold on it. If you’re really interested in trying Reinvigorate, leave a comment on this post, and in a few days I might email them to let them know of all your individual requests. It’s up to them if they want you to try them out, so I don’t promise anything.
Stats Plugin
I’m including this because I think it was only released yesterday, and some of you may not have come across it as yet.
Having never been a WordPress.com user of their free blog service, I know nothing about their stats set up for each blog in the admin area. However, it seems to be very popular. Because of this, they have released a service that will allow WordPress.org (self hosted) users to take advantage of their stats package through a plugin. I can’t say anymore because I haven’t tried it myself, but I may do so. If you’re interested, head over here to find out more.
Conclusion
As much as I’ve got a soft spot for StatCounter, I can see me moving solely to either Pmetrics or Reinvigorate. They just offer so much more, and being able to accurately analyze your visitors and their movements on your site, can help you focus your site on what works.
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Comments
2 Responses to “5 Web Stats Programs For You To Consider”
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I, like you have been a Statcounter user for several years and have been happy with their system, but have recently been using PMetrics, and really like a lot of the features. I’d be interested in trying Reinvigorate if you think it’s worth comparing to PMetrics.
Randa - To be honest, even if I move permanently to another counter, I’ll probably keep Statcounter going too. I suppose we find it difficult to part with what we’re familiar with sometimes.
As far as Reinvigorate goes, I’ll wait a few days to see if anyone else is interested before I email Sean.