Website Analysis – StatCounter

StatCounter is by far my favorite log analysis software. It’s free, easy to use, and gives you great info about the visitors to your site.

Like Google Analytics, once you register, it gives you a snippet of code to place on each page in your site.
The first screen you see when loggin in is the Traffic Analysis:

It’s pretty basic: Pageviews, visitors & returning visitors. Again, my site is not the paragon of traffic!

I spend 99% of my time in the Recent Visitor Activity screen:

I love this screen because it concisely gives you so much information about visitors. Number of visits, Browser/computer stats, geographic location, entry page, referring URL, and number of pages visited in that session are available at your fingertips. Clicking on the magnifying glass next to the entry takes you to a drill-down view of that visitor’s session.

The other screens I use a bit are Keyword Analysis, that shows aggregate stats by keyword, and Recent Keyword Activity, which shows info on recent searches:

I’d love a way to combine the two – I think adding a column on # of searches and allowing sorting by date or by # of searches would be ideal. I do like the display of the Landing Page in the Recent Keyword Activity screen – it allows you to see what page is indexed with the engine. I also think that adding a column that would show the ranking of your site of the term would be interesting. I’m amazed how many people come to may pages from the 200th result for a search – there are very persistent people out there!

The only drawback with StatCounter is that you are limited to viewing the activity of the last 100 visitors in the free version (aggregate data is kept forever). For a lame site like mine, it’s not a problem. You can increase your log size up to 25,000 which should keep most webmasters very happy.

Next time, I’ll look into newcomers Performancing and Crazy Egg.