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

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

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.

“Robots/Spiders” visitors will tell you how often search engines and other robots (like Alexa and Netcraft) are visiting your site. “Visits duration” will tell you how long people typically stay on your site. Remember, you want them to stay longer. “File type” tells you what type of files are accessed most frequently and how much bandwidth they consume.

“Pages-URL” will tell you which pages on your website get visited the most. This is important. If a certain page is visited frequently, you might consider making more pages like it. “Operating Systems” tells you what systems your visitors are running, and “Browsers” tells you the web browsers they are using. “Referrers” is another important one. From it you can determine how people get to your site. Is it primarily through search engines, bookmarks, or links from others sites?

Finally, “Search Keyphrases” and “Search Keywords” tells you what people searched for to get to your site. This helps both with advertising and targeting content. All of these statistics are important, and together they can help you piece together the state of your site and what you can do to improve its performance and increase the number and quality of visitors.

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.

Unique visitors: This is the true measure of your actual audience, and the only one you can truly use to brag to your non-techie friends. This counts each individual computer that connects to your site and only counts it once, no matter how many pages or files it accesses. Even this is not fool-proof, but it will give you a much clearer idea of the number of visitors you receive each month.

Pages: This statistic tells you the number of pages accessed on your site each month. It can be correlated with your number of visitors. If it is close to being the same, either your site is very small or people are not staying long.

Bandwidth: This tells you the number of bytes transfered to and from visitors. It is important if you have a bandwidth limit, but most likely nothing to worry about unless you have a very high-traffic site.

In my next post, I will delve deeper into website statistics.

Photo: SXC

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