Counters are so 1999

Still using a counter on your website? Then you probably still listen to vinyl records and run Windows 95. Although very popular in the web’s early days, counter scripts are now very outdated technology and only websites stuck in the 1990s still use them.

Most counters are not only ugly to look at and easily manipulated, but only serve to tell the world how few visitors your site has received. While many hosts offer these free counter scripts, find a good web analytics service instead.

My personal favorite is Google Analytics. Two free statistics programs available at nearly all hosts are Analog and Webalizer. Using any one of these services will not only give you more accurate information, but provide a wealth of information about visitors. This includes country of origin, referring websites, what web browsers and operating systems visitors use, and in some cases, visitor behavior.

Given that much better alternatives to counters are available for free, why would you still use one?

Photo | Flickr

Speed up Google Analytics on your server

The Problem: You have a frequently visited website and use Google Analytics to gather important statistical information about your users. Unfortunately, every time a user accesses your main page, it takes longer load whenever they have to download the urchin.js file that Google’s server sends.

The essentially technical problem is that the user not only has to connect to your server to download your content but also has to contact Google’s server to download urchin.js. This takes more time and increases your page load time.

The Solution:Host urchin.js locally on your server. That way, the user never has to connect to Google’s server for anything. The only issue to resolve is what to do when Google updates their urchin.js. Fortunately, a thoughtful user has created a script, complete with instructions, that will periodically get the new urchin.js file from Google. Now you will have a faster site and still know whether or not people are actually visiting it.

Photo: Flickr

Understanding Website Statistics: Part 2

In my first post, I covered four basic components found in most statistics software. In this post, we will examine them more closely and also take a look at some more specific stats. An important way to gauge your website’s success is to look at the daily breakdown of those four components: number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth. Your graph may show certain days as having spikes, much higher than others. Find out what you did on that day and what content you posted.

Your statistics will also tell you which days of the week and hours of the day were the prime times for site visitors. Next, take a look at the breakdown of visitors by country. Hopefully, the country of your target audience will be first. If not, you might need to reevaluate your language policy and cultural references in your content.

You should have a section for “hosts”, including “top 25″ and “full list”. This is very important if you suspect security problems. Normally, you will have a few ip addresses with more hits than others, but if you have one or two that are extremely large compared to the others, you might have an attacker or someone attempting to attack.
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Understanding Website Statistics

Most web hosting providers provide statistical analysis software, such as Webalizer or Awstats. In all likelihood, some type of software is gathering data about your website, even if you did not previously know it or configure it. Now that you know about it or even if you already did, you need to know how to understand the terminology.

Hits: The most commonly-used term people throw around to brag about their websites is “hits”. People love boasting to their friends about how their website scores 300,000 hits per month. The fact is, however, that “hits” are not the most accurate way to tell how many website visitors you actually get. A hit is counted every time a single file (document, image, etc.) is accessed. That means a single visitor could conceivably be responsible for 500 hits, and those hits are registered each time the person visits.

Number of visits: A more accurate report of actual website traffic is “number of visits”. This is how many times someone visited your website. It could be a single person or multiple people. It will include you and also various search engine bots.
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Average Internet user visits 70 domains each month

I already know I am way over the average, but the new statistics released by Nielsen Online are worth investigating, especially if your business is online. According to the report, the average person visits 70 domains and 1576 web pages each month. That means that most of the pages they see are within a few sites, undoubtedly including major search engines and social networking sites.

Each day, according to the report, a person will view 42 pages per online session, which lasts about 1.02 hours. At the end of a month, a person will have accumulated 37.21 hours of web site browsing. I can only wonder what my statistics would look like for the nights I fall asleep with my browser still open. Even more interesting is that UK users are apparently the biggest net junkies, clocking 47 web sessions and 86 domain visits per month.

The average person spends 51 seconds on a web page, just long enough to see someone fall from a bike on YouTube. In the UK, they spend only 49 seconds. The report estimates that the “Digital Media Universe” now has a population of 560,574,661. Despite the economic recession, there seems to be no reduction in the amount of pointing and clicking, something that is sure to make Internet service providers and web site owners happy.

Source: Nielsen Online
Photo: Flickr