Gone are the days when people used so called hit counters, they were actually pageview counter. Those who knew coding made their own counters and for others there were always free hit counter service (which I also used in some websites). Still cPanel has hit counter feature which no one cares to use.
Statcounter was the first webstat service provider I used and it’s great. What this webstat service provider offer is a treasure of information about your website visitors at no cost. This is same with all like google analytics, statcounter and histats, however statcounter do has an upgrade option in case you have a website that got lots of visitors. Statcounter and histats are more eye candy and there service will make you happy even if your website does not get enough hits. Google analytics looks more professional and offer some more advance reports which can be helpful for professionals. For average website owner, statcounter and histats provide more than enough information to keep them busy and thinking whole night! I have not used histats service (it’s always better to stick to any one and not jump here and there) but the demo at their website show lots of eye candy and heavy use of ajax and flash work. I switched to google analytics from statcouter few months back when I found some problem with statcounter. To collect visitors information, all there webstat code place a cookie in the visitors computer, now the cookie of that statcounter was recognized as spyware by my favourite antispyware software “Spybot”, now this was a false alarm and the cookie was not actually a spyware but still I know this, some more people who are reading this now know it but majority of the visitors will think bad about my website and fear of spying will definitely keep them away fro my website which was not at all good. So finally I have to say bye bye to statcounter but I still miss its simplicity and functionality. The best feature of statcounter was powered by google itself which I don’t know why google doesn’t include it in analytics as well; it’s a google map in which you can actually see location of your visitor, I have an old screenshot to show you:

Recently google analytics has improved its service and the new interface is cool and better understandable than before, though the delay in report generation still exist, statcounter was very fast and histats claims to be real time. However analytics is completely free for both personal and professional use. There are many free webstat providers on internet which may be very tempting but sometimes they use their service to spy and sell your data to other companies. So stay away from them.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 8:41 am and is filed under Webmaster. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.