The first step after you set up your blog, should be to put up your stat tracker. Because without one, you will be essentially blogging in the dark. You will never know what people liked, and what you should write more on. However, the question is, which stat tracker do I use? There are lots of different popular ones, and everybody swears that there’s is the best. Also, pretty much all of them are free, which makes it an enjoyable decision, but still, which is the best for your site? Now you may be wondering, what difference can a tracker make? Well the answer is that, some trackers are Much better then others, like significantly better. And by better I mean, “that they find and record more visitors then the others.” You may be asking, well what’s the difference between five to ten more visits, well the answer is that it isn’t just 5-10 visits, it’s more like 20-50%. Yes you read that right, if you get the wrong tracker, it can miss up to 50% of your traffic for that day.

Now you understand the importance of the right one. I’m going to show you the several ones that I have used, and organize them by how much I like them. And then show you several others that I haven’t used, but that have been recommended to me by others.

            *Note*  All of these are free services. My goal is to only write about free things on this blog, and so you don’t need to worry about having to use your creditcards, for information from my site. I distrust many online services, and so I am as hesitant as you are for buying stuff, especially when there’s another option that’s just as good, but free!

1. Google Analytics

This is probably the most famous tracker. It’s very easy to install and use, and is considered one of the best. It is highly regarded in the blogging world, simply because it’s from Google. However, Analytics records the least amount of traffic, of any trackers that I’ve tried, by a significant amount. Analytics gets at least 30-40% less traffic, then other ones I’ve tried, and that’s every day. However, I would still recommend you use Analytics, if nothing else but the fact that it’s so respected. Also it’s free, easy to set up, and it will keep track forever, which some sites don’t do as you will learn. So my  advice would be to set up Analytics, and check back with it every now and then, but don’t use that as your only one, and Don’t use it as your source when you advertise how many hits your sties gets, because you will be way undercutting yourself.

2. Statcounter

This is another very popular tracker. This has two options, a paid version, and a free version. I use the free version as my main traffic analyzer, and have found it to be much more accurate then Analytics. It also gives you much more detailed information, on figuring out where the visits came from. There is really no need to get the paid version, because the only difference is that it will log more then the last 500 hits. If you are getting over 500 hits a day on a consistent basis, then you may need to upgrade, but for most people a log of 500 hits is plenty for a daily basis. Also, if you use both statcounter and analytics, you will be able to see a general idea of past traffic, as well as the recent traffic. I would highly recommend this, and until a week ago would have proclaimed it as the best, however that has somewhat changed, although I would still definitely use it. 

3. Woopra Beta 

This is one that I just found this past week, and I really like it. It is slightly different in that it is a program on your computer, instead of a computer script like the others. However, I find this almost better, because I can keep it up in the background while I’m working and not have it in the browser.  However, it is in it’s free beta form, but will soon be for pay. It’s possible that the beta term has already ended, because I haven’t been able to log in for the last couple days. But Woopra really shook me up because it showed a significantly higher amount of traffic then even statcounter, and much higher then analytics. So now I’m trying every free tracker I can find, just out of curiosity to see which one tracks the most, I’ll keep you updated on my progress, but back to woopra. One feature that I really like about it, is you can set it to a live option, and then you can see if there are any visitors on your site at that exact moment. And if there are, you can send them a message that will show up on their browser saying, “message from webmaster.” It’s pretty useful for getting feedback from your readers, and also staying connected with them. So I would suggest adding this one as well.

Those three are the only ones I’ve tried, but I’ve created a small list of other free ones that I found off of google. I haven’t checked any of them, so it’s possible they’re junk, but feel free to check them out anyways.

Other trackers

http://www.mvtracker.com/

http://www.addfreestats.com/

http://www.accesscounter.com/

http://www.truecounter.net/

http://www.ritecounter.com/

http://gostats.com/

http://www.statssheet.com/

http://www.onestatfree.com/

http://www.stat08.com/

There’s one more that I wanted to mention called Awstats. Collin from Feedflare, suggested it to me, and though I have yet to try it, you can check it out as well by clicking this link.

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Will has been designing websites for over a decade, and has extensive experience with Joomla!, WordPress, and social media. He has consulted hundreds of businessmen and webmasters on the oftentimes mystifying aspects of Search Engine Optimization.

Will has blogged 54 posts here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 1:26 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.