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Web Counters
A web counter or hit counter is a computer
software program that indicates the number of visitors, or hits, a
particular webpage has received. Once set up, these web counters
will be incremented by one every time the web page is accessed in a
web browser.
Web Counter Information:
Some statistics from your web counter will provide a report on what
is sometimes called "Visitor Path" or "Path Through". This report
shows the series of pages that your users visit when they reach your
site. For example, the report may show that the visitors first
arrive at your main page, and then move on to your products list and
your the price list, before reaching your shopping cart page. This
information can help you understand what your visitors are looking
for and what they are interested in. It can also help you evaluate
whether the navigational structure of your website is conducive for
getting your visitors where they want to go. Many of the web
analytics software provide a report on the search engine key phrases
that visitors used to successfully find your site. Some software not
only give a summary of the key phrases, but also breaks it down
according to the pages you have on your site. This is very useful in
determining what visitors are looking for when they arrive at your
pages. This helps you adjust your site accordingly. Key phrase
information also lets you know whether the specific web page you're
looking at is sufficiently search engine friendly. For example, if
you think that a particular phrase appropriately describe that page,
but you notice that no one seems to have ever located that page on
your site using that key phrase, then perhaps that page needs some
work
Types of Web Counters:
Most webmasters, hosted on a commercial web host, probably rely on
the default web statistics software provided by their web host. This
is typically one of the free web statistics and analytics software
that you can also download and install on your web account yourself.
Not all of these software provide sufficient information for your
use. For example, I personally find that
Webalizer
and Analog
lack many useful reports. They are probably okay if you run a simple
personal site and don't plan to do much with it.
Http-analyze is slightly better, but it
still fails to provide useful things like key phrases, visitor paths
and even little things like the referring URLs of those pesky 404
errorsAnother possibility is to use a
third-party online web statistics services. Not everyone likes to
use such services, of course, since it means that your web
statistics data is held by a third party. Among the free online
services I think that
Google
Analytics and
StatCounter
are probably better than the rest. On the down side, Google
Analytics limits the number of page views on your site while
StatCounter only provides detailed stats for the last 500 log
entries. There are reports unique to each of them, that is, each of
them have reports that the other does not. I often use Stat Counter
from
this site. I have tried plenty of different
web counters but this place really offers the most information.
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