StatCounter - great for small sites
I am always looking for cheap, reliable ways to analyze the traffic to my websites. I always assumed that I would just have to wait until I got huge and could afford something like Omniture or CoreMetrics. Those products are great for enterprise-level sites, but if you’re just doing your own smaller site (under 500K monthly hits) I highly recommend StatCounter.
You can get a free version of StatCounter, but you will only be able to get drill-down data on your last 100 pageviews. For just $9/month you can upgrade to 1K pageviews and for $19 you can get 10K. Drill-down data shows you things like which keyword they came in on, what browser they are using, what country they are in, etc.
Of course these people are not dumb, they do have a clear revenue model. When you see how easy the product is to use (you install a snippet of javascript on each of your pages), they know you will get hooked. When your site grows a little bit you will be more likely to pull out your credit card and get real data on what’s happening on your site. Also, StatCounter is not a log file analyzer that just looks at the data that your webserver is already logging, but they actually host your data on their site. This makes it very difficult for you to leave StatCounter and take your data with you.
The stats probably won’t blow you away, but they are free and, in my opinion, comparable to what you get from Urchin (now owned by Google) for around $200/month. They are graphical and very intuitive.
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
[…] If you’re looking for a decent analytics package Statcounter may no longer be your best option. In March Google announced its purchase of site-analytic software developer Urchin Software Corp. Urchin’s analytics package is great for small businesses, but up until today I couldn’t justify the $200 per month pricetag for the package compared to Statcounter’s $30 option. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » Google makes Urchin free — November 14, 2005 @ 8:43 pm
[…] Examples of some JavaScript snippets that people often clutter their pages with include StatCounter, Google Analytics, different affiliate programs (most use JavaScript), Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network and tons more. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » JavaScript on webpages — December 20, 2005 @ 6:42 pm