Free Resource for Website Visitor Tracking

Operating a successful website depends on a number of factors, one of which is generating traffic.  Knowing where your visitors are coming from and what brought them to your site is invaluable information for evaluating the success of your current promotional efforts and for planning new ones.

StatCounter (http://www.statcounter.com/) is a free, invisible tool for tracking and collecting data about visitors to your website.  It tells you what links referred them to your site, what pages they visited, and how long they were looking at each page.  Information on how they access the Internet, what browser they use, and any Internet search engines they used to find you is also collected.  Some security applications will delete StatCounter cookies as spyware, but they are not dangerous and do not collect personal information of any kind about your visitors.

StatCounter’s basic free service will store information on the last 500 visitors you had, and that information can be downloaded as either an Excel file or in .csv format.  Larger log sizes are available for an additional charge.  You can set a blocking cookie on your own system in order to prevent StatCounter from counting your own visits to your site and taking up space in your log file.

My favorite part of StatCounter is actually something it doesn’t do: require you to display an ad link for it on your site.  In fact, StatCounter will tell you exactly how much traffic you’re getting from each of your ad links, making it very easy to decide which to focus on and which to delete for poor performance.

You do have to add StatCounter’s code to your website, but it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting a few lines of HTML.  Reviewing your data is also very easy and intuitive, even if you have only limited knowledge of website operation and management.

No matter how great your site is, if you don’t get traffic, you can’t succeed.  StatCounter separates the wheat from the chaff so that you can put your effort into productive sources and building the traffic you need.