There’s a great way to liven up your own blog, website or personal place in cyberspace with a relatively new cool device (widget).

Plain old “hit counters” are boring ––

How ’bout a FREE FLAG COUNTER?

Here’s your chance to add a FREE “hit” or “stat” counter to any website with just a simple image. Every time someone from a new country visits your blog or site, a new flag will be added to your counter. The total number of visitors from each country is shown next to the flag. Clicking on the counter image will reveal amazing charts and information!

• Flag Counters are fast, fun, reliable, and best of all, free of charge!

• You can now get your own Flag Counter with just one line of HTML code.

• You can even customize your counter to give it your own personal and unique flair

You can put a flag counter on pretty much any site. All that is required is that the site supports images. This particular Flag Counter is a simple image!

It’s also quite simple to make changes to your Flag Counter. You can change and customize your counter’s colors, add rows, and much more, at any time. On the bottom of any of your statistics pages (that you can access after clicking on your counter) there is a “Regenerate HTML” link. Just follow that link and you’ll be modifying your existing Flag Counter. When you’re finished, just swap out your old HTML code with the new code and you’ll be all set! It’s that easy!

One of the best parts about it for me is that it does not require any registration. Just configure how you want your flag counter to look like, it will then generate a HTML code, then just paste it into your blog or other website. It’s so simple.

There is also a forum section for members to interact with one another if they so desire – it is NOT a requirement. No personal information is required to activate your FREE stat counter unless you upgrade to their PRO EDITION.

To celebrate the launch of this new feature, they’re giving five lucky forum users FREE Flag Counter Pro, FOR LIFE! To see all the details, and to learn how to win, check out the forum section of their site.

Check out the Flag Counter on this site you’re on right now in the lower right-hand column (sidebar) of this page. There’s actually two of them – one for US visitors and one for Worldwide visitors.

Click this LINK to visit Flag Counter for yourself!

Gazing Upon Pemberley - prints available on Etsy.

I can’t praise my web tracker highly enough! I’ve been using Statcounter for the past couple years, tracking all my visitors to www.taraflyphotos.com … and it has provided me with an overabundance of insight: I don’t necessarily take full advantage of this information, and I accept full responsibility for the limited growth of my business.  It takes a great deal of work to optimize and market a website, and I find wearing multiple hats (artist, PR relations, publicist, web designer, accountant, etc.) a bit daunting and time-intensive for this Infamous Procrastinator who would much rather be painting, watching period dramas on A+E, and baking honey biscuits. 

For those of you with personal websites and blogs that allow HTML-editing access… this is the tracker you should seriously take into consideration. Test it out!  Many people are using GoogleAnalytics, which I am forced to use for my Etsy Shop and my Artfire Shop (since individual shop owners are not given access to their pages’ HTML script)… I haven’t fully examined everything GA has to offer, such as Setting Goals for shop views, however I much prefer the set-up and detailed stats of my personal tracker overall. 

StatCounter is an invisible web tracker and hit counter, that provides detailed information about your web viewers. You can set up a free account and create a Project. It provides you with the html code to install on every webpage you want to track.  (I’m tracking all eight pages of my website)
 
They offer free summary stats for the lifetime of your website, with detailed stats for your last 500 visitors (250,000 page loads).  For a sliding fee, you can increase your “log-size”, allowing you to receive detailed stats for a greater number of visitors (up to 25,000 visitors/15,000,000 page loads for $29.00 per month). 

I personally find the free stats sufficient for my tiny slice of the web.  I’m currently getting an average of 72 viewers monthly, with page views ranging from 115-174 hits.  With detailed stats of my last 500 visitors, I can research visits in-depth back to mid-July.  In the beginning, I was glued to my stats report, but now I check in about once a month – whenever I remember, or if I want to research a particular spike in sales or activity. 

Here is a small slice of my hits for September – I’ve removed the individual ISP addresses in Photoshop:

Visitor stats for Sept. www.taraflyphotos.com

The detailed stats report provides a window to gaze upon each visitor: One of my favorite features is the service provider info. Typically the Host is a telephone or cable company for private users (i.e. Comcast, Verizon, BellSouth) but occasionally I’ll find business servers thrown into the mix.  Companies and facilities providing their own internet
services (for employees or patrons) include libraries, schools, government offices, and large private companies.
I’ve been able to identify visiting friends using this information; an example would be a former classmate who visited my website from a referring Facebook link, while he ate lunch in his office.  According to StatCounter, the Host was a private advertising company from the D.C. area, the name of which rang a familiar bell to me … so I checked my friends’ Facebook profiles, and discovered the classmate who worked at that very firm. lol   

Here is an example of a detailed status report showing a visit from Lily, the owner of TwoStrayCats on Etsy and a good friend of mine. I’ve removed her ISP from this screenshot.

Lily's detailed visitor stats - www.taraflyphotos.com

  You could say that I’m spying on people who visit my site, and you’d be right.  But isn’t that what ALL businesses do online?  Knowing who your customers are, what they’re searching for, and how they find you, is essential to marketing effectively. 

The majority of my visitors who find me via search engines, were using Web Images for their results. JPGs of my artwork matched the keywords in their search, and the visual image drew them inside with a click.  StatCounter provides the actual search page link, so I can follow it back and view their results… I find it flattering that my artwork caught their eye, on a page packed with related images.
  
Another aspect I like to examine is the Navigation Path.  Their initial search inquiry led them to a specific page of my website, but where did they go from there?  Did they view my artist profile? My art gallery? Perhaps their interest was piqued enough to check out my online selling venues – My Etsy or Artfire shop. 

Here is the Navigation Path for Lily’s multiple visits to my website.  At one point, she was checking out a small banner (advertising her Etsy shop: TwoStrayCats) that I placed on my Biography page. Notice the referring link came from an Etsy convo (i.e. private message).

Lily's navigational path on www.taraflyphotos.com

I also take note when a visitor does not use a referring link; when they have typed the address directly into their browser, instead of clicking on a provided link.  It could mean they know my address already, have it bookmarked, copied it from a business card, or simply cut-n-pasted it into their browser after finding it online somewhere. 

There are a few flaws with StatCounter that I’ve noticed; the most obvious one is the “length of visit” stats are sometimes a bit off – when you figure a visit with multiple page-views had to last longer than 0 seconds.  Perhaps I simply haven’t learned to interpret it properly either. lol 

Also, don’t take the visitor’s “City” location literally. People who live in small towns may not have a local internet provider, so their service will be hosted by a neighboring city. (Note Lily’s stats: she does not reside in Red Deer, Alberta, but rather, a small village nearby). 

Comparing GA and StatCounter: they feature many of the same tidbits of information – most popular pages, keyword analysis, visitor maps, referring URLs, etc.  Except that for those of you, like myself, who find GA’s layout a bit confusing, you will enjoy the direct approach here.
The summary page will show graphs, for people who like visual pie charts and bar graphs… but I prefer accessing my information as a straight-forward list: 

Top exit links for visits to www.taraflyphotos.com

As I’ve said, the tools are all here to develop websites (and businesses) into the best they can be. The real challenge is to take these tools and refine the site, maximizing its potential to reach the right crowd, and shedding light upon the dark recesses where folks stumble and lose their way. 
And that, I’m afraid, means shutting off the Arts and Entertainment channel. :_( 

My blog stats have fallen asleep

At about 9 months old, my blog on WordPress.com had been coming along well.  From humble beginnings where 50 hits got me all excited, it’s gotten to a point where it was generating at least 500-600 hits a day.  More recently 700-900.  As high as 1000 even.  Until two days ago, that is.

I was shocked to see that my stats fell dramatically yesterday to around 400.  I’ve had drop offs like that before, but usually only because I had a post that got Stumbled or something and it went up unusually high the previous day.  There had never been a drop of 300+ in a day when the stats were moderately steady.

However, today I was stunned to see things got even worse.  With just a couple of hours before the stat counter rolls over, I’ve only got 173 hits.  That’s the lowest I’ve had since probably April this year, when the blog was still in adolescence.  Is it a genuine drop-off in visits or a problem with the stat meter?

Trawling the WordPress forums, it seems I’m not the only one that’s experiencing this. It’s been said that a lot of things can go wrong in logging a hit, with search engines, servers, programs, systems, etc etc, so hopefully it’s not a permanent downward spiral.  I feared that perhaps this was my real stats and that my old ones were just wrongly inflated, but it appears the WordPress stat meter is one of the more accurate ones out there (not that I have tried anything else).

Anyone else out there having similar problems?

There’s a school of thought that the only reliable way to rank blogs is by using actual sitemeter data for visits. Unfortunately, most blogs don’t make this information public. Perhaps if more did bloggers could compare their statistics with those for other sites or have a listed ranking. This would help their interpretation.

I have managed to identify 37 New Zealand blogs with public sitemeter stats, or who self report this information – mostly from Tumeke’s blog ranking reports (see nz blogosphere rankings : March 2009). So how do these sites rank amongst themselves? Have a look at the table below for the April ‘09 data. And for those interested in comparing sitemeter data with the traditional blog ranking indices, and with the rankings of Tumeke, Halfdone and Open Parachute – look at my analysis below the table.

Update: Homepaddock has passed on (see Naked Stats) that her stats are also public so we now have 38 blogs on the list.

Estimating visit numbers

Tumeke bases his ranking score on sitemeter data for visits, or (in most cases) an estimate of these. His estimate is based on Alexa Rank data (3 month average). So I have used a correlation analysis to judge how well Alexa Rank, and other common indices, predict the visit numbers for April ‘09.

The results are summarised in the table below. These suggest that Alexa Rank and Technorati Rank explain 40% and 48% of the variation in visit numbers rerspectively. Both are better predictors than Alexa NZ Rank. However Google Reader Subscription Counts predicts equally well as Technorati Rank, and better than Alexa Rank. Unfortunately, fewer blogs are ranked by Technorati than Alexa which creates problems.

When the raw data is ranked (1-37, or 1-32 for Tehcnorati) for each blog I found Alexa Rank, Techorati Rank and Google Reader Subscription Counts would be equally predictive (about 50%) for ranking  visits.

* Logarithmic relationship

Using published blog rankings

So how effective are the blog ranking systems used by Tumeke, HalfDone and Open Parachute in predicting ranking of sitemeter visit numbers? I have given estimates of the effectiveness for each system in the table below.

Although Tumeke’s data for April ‘09 are not yet available it would clearly give the best estimate because it uses actual, or estimated, visit numbers. These have a big influence because they contribute the largest amount (80% on average) to the final score (ranking score = actual or estimated visits + Technorati Authority + average weekly posts + average weekly comments ).

However, the fact that visit numbers are estimated from Alexa Rank for most blogs means the actual predictive power of the final score is far lower than estimated from these 37 sites alone (54% compared with 79% for March data using the 28 sites for which sitemeter data was available).

Halfdone’s ranking score uses the formula Score = (Alexa Rank x Alexa NZ Rank)/Technorati Authority/1000.

The predictive power of Open Parachute’s aggregate ranking of the 4 ranking indices only is slightly better than the total aggregate ranking (11 indices).

* March data using sitemeter data
** March data using Alexa Rank to estimate visits

I think there would be a lot of value in a blog ranking based on actual visit counts. The list above may encourage more NZ bloggers to allow public access to their stats.

On the other hand. I think there is value in having some idea of ranking based on other criteria such as links and RSS subscription counts. Different bloggers may be interested in different criteria for judging their performance.

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Do you follow the traffic statistics on your website? Why should you care and how can it help you?

Web stats are a piece of the puzzle

There are many different website tracking programs and the 2 that I like to use are Statcounter and Google Anaytics.  On each of these they are free to setup your account and configure.  You get a piece of coding that you or your web programmer will add to each page of the website.  Once you have this added you can login to the stat site to view the action.

Viewing the traffic

You can get different views of periods of times.

• Visitors - look at numbers of first time and returning visitors.  If you have a lot of first time visitor but a low number of return visitors – look at your site and see if you are giving people good reasons to book mark you, add your RSS feed, sign up for something that will bring them back to the site on a regular basis. Does your email newsletter and blog lead people back to your website for more information?
• Pages - what are the most popular pages on the website?  Look at the number of hits sorted by frequency. What pages are not visited?  Are people getting to your action pages – your sign up forms, contact pages?
• Conversions - on Google Analytics you are able to setup specific GOALS. For example you could set as a goal the reply page from your contact for, or a download of a free report.  What is the conversion rate on your website – i.e. how many people that come to the site get to your goal.
• Geographic - Where are your website visitors coming from?  You can see the information in a map or as a list of countries, states and cities.  This information can be valuable in looking for new business opportunities.  You may have a very local service – but if you have an international reach are there some information products or other things that you can consider that would be appropriate for the broader geographic interest?
• Path - How many pages do your visitors look at and what path do they take through the site?  You can view specific visitor paths, and statistics on average number of pages per visit.  Reviewing this information gives you an idea of how “sticky” your site is and if people stay for a long time and browse or participate in some way.
• Search Engines – What keywords are people using that get them to your site? Which search engines are sending you traffic?  Do these give you ideas for additional meta tags or search engine optimization?  Are there some major search engines that are not sending you traffic? Check that your site is registered with them to get indexed.  Check that your site includes good keywords and descriptions in the meta tags and particularly on the home page of your website that you use text in the body area the describes your key concepts.
• Other sites – What other websites are sending you traffic.  This might be from your own blogs or from your related websites or alliance partners.  Look at the sites that are sending you traffic – can you help them in some way or are there other sites similar to them that you can build a relationship with?

These are just a few ideas on how to use your website traffic statistics to help you plan and continue to improve and build your website to be an effecitve part of your business or nonprofit.

Sign up for our email newsletter to receive additional tips and strategies and notice of upcoming teleseminars.

About a week ago, I wrote a blog post titled Everybody Loves a Peeping Tom, which addressed how effective the SMM activity of observing conversation can be in retaining your company’s current customers and generating a buzz to attract new customers.

Yesterday, I wrote a completely unrelated blog post, which reviewed some of the best free Web Analytics products that are available today, and the price you pay for “free”.

Ironically, today I was contacted by the CEO at StatCounter, who commented about my review of his product.

The intentions of Mr. Cullen’s comment to my article are obvious. I know the guy wanted to post a comment on my page so that readers could glance down at the comment and notice that technical corrections had been made to StatCounter; however, I am sure Mr. Cullen also realized that there are not many (if any) subscribers to my blog. Heck, in the three posts I have made on Sphinn, I have only received 8 Sphinn Votes, and a majority of those came from an article someone else wrote.

The truth is, I am just a small rookie fish in a giant ocean of internet marketers who have much more

credible of an opinion than I do. But Mr. Cullen didn’t care about my credibility. He wanted to address the problems I had experienced with his product, and reclaim my confidence in his brand.

Looks like some company’s do care what the little people think about their product after all. Good show Mr. Cullen. How are things in Dublin?

Here is his coment:

Hi Justin,

I just wanted to drop by and thank you for your review of StatCounter – we really appreciate it.

If I may, I’d like to respond to some of your points …

IP Blocking

###########
We are actually rolling out our new version of StatCounter (http://blog.statcounter.com/?p=9 at the moment and over the last few days we did have some trouble with the IP blocking feature. This problem affected projects created over approximately a one week period but has now been fully resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Invisible Option & Custom Logo

##############################
We give all members (free and upgraded) the option of a completely invisible counter, a very customisable counter and a choice of buttons for their website. Our members are not forced to display a counter or logo on their sites.

In case there is any confusion, I just thought I would clarify what we mean by offering a “Custom Logo” option with upgraded accounts. This feature is mainly for our members who are website developers and track multiple sites within their StatCounter accounts.

To make this explanation a bit clearer let’s talk about DEVELOPER who is a website developer and has designed numerous websites for various customers including CLIENT.

Using the StatCounter user access privilege options DEVELOPER can assign special log

in details to CLIENT. Using this log in information, CLIENT can log into DEVELOPER’s StatCounter account BUT only see stats for his OWN website. In other words, the stats for the other sites built by DEVELOPER are not visible to CLIENT.

The Custom Logo feature allows DEVELOPER to display his OWN logo within the StatCounter account so the DEVELOPER logo is visible to all his clients when they log into his StatCounter account. I hope that explains!

Incompatiblity

##############
StatCounter works very well alongside all tracking programs… so we were a little surprised to hear that you have heard of an issue with wordpress tracking. If you have any more details about this we would be very grateful if you could pass these on to us so that we can investigate further. Please use this form and mark your comments for my attention:
http://www.statcounter.com/contactus.html

Thanks again for the review!

All the best,

Aodhan Cullen

StatCounter CEO

I’m not sure if you have noticed, but our economy is kind of in the crapper right now. The low value of our homes is beyond frustrating. The unemployment rate is borderline depressing. To top it all off, the record high gas prices have caused even the most image conscious citizens to weigh their options on trading in their vehicle for a Vespa.

No doubt about it, times are tough for almost everyone.

In the midst of our looming recession, I am sure that, like me, you want to get the most bang for your buck on any purchase that you make.

Luckily for those of us who need a great Website Analytics service to keep tabs on our website’s visitors, there is no need to spend even a buck to get a whole lot of bang. Welcome to the wonderful world of freeware (or free basic version that kinda does the trick.) Keep in mind though, that nothing is ever truly free. Everything has a price, and that price does not necessarily have to have dollar sign in front of it.

The list below contains some the best free website analytics services that are available, what their best features are, and what price you have to pay for the free product. Look on the bright side, they might be able to help you save up for that gallon of gas you always wanted.

Stat Counter

Best features:

• Visitor Paths – Reveals the navigation path of each visitor (i.e., which parts of your website they went to) as well as the amount of time they was spent they spent in each area.

• Magnify User – Enables the user to narrow down visitors to their host name, city, ISP, # of visits, Browser, and even their Operating System. I conducted a trial test to determine how accurate this was by visiting my website from 4 different locations around Atlanta. StatCounter only gave me 1 inaccurate result out of 4, but I will cut them some slack since the only thing they got wrong was my location on one of the trials, which was still within 30 miles of where I actually logged in from.

• Popular Pages – Provides the user with a list of their websites most popular pages, which can be customized to show rank by the amount of time that was spent on each page, or how many times the actual pages were visited.

• Entry and Exit Pages – Shows the user the most frequent entry and exit pages, which of course are ranked according to their relative frequency.

• Search Engine Wars – provides a list which shows you which search engines generate the most traffic for you.

• Recent Visitor Activity – This is probably one of the tools on StatCounter that I use the most. It gives you a list of your most recent visitors (whom you can of course individually magnify)

Price You Pay

• Limited Features – The free website analytics package comes with every feature except for secure tracking, daily email reports, and the option to create a custom brand logo for the tracking device on your web page; however, the free package does not require users to add the StatCounter logo to their site, but instead give you the option to make the tracker invisible.
  

• Compatibility Issues – StatCounter may not be compatible with, or provide inaccurate results, if you are tracking user activity on public websites that have their own free analytics service, like WordPress for example.

• Technical Issues – StatCounter also seems to have technical issues with the IP Blocking feature. For example, every time I visit my own website to conduct a modification, it tracks the visit, even though I specifically added my IP address to the blocker. This technical flaw can also be extremely frustrating. Amendment: The CEO at StatCounter informed me that they were having some technical issues for about 2 weeks with their IP Blocking feature, but they seem to have recently worked out all the bugs, so it works fine now.
  

Google Analytics

Best Features

• Customizable Dashboard – Navigating through the large amount of data reports and features that Google Analytics has to offer can be overwhelming, time consuming, and frustrating; however, taking the time to customize your dashboard to include your most important data reports is going to help you avoid these navigational issues, and save you a lot of time down the road.

• Bounce Rate Data- Ahh…good old bounce rate. This is one of the more useful data reports that Google analytics provides. Not to mention, I don’t think there are any other free website analytics services that provide bounce rate data.

• Conversion Goals – the conversion goal tool in Google Analytics is great way to define and track outcomes or actions that you desire from the individuals who visit your website. Google has a guide that goes into more detail about the tool, and instructions on how to set it up.

• Context – Essentially allows you to compare one data report to another. Very helpful in assisting the analysts and decision makers.

• Map Feature – While a lot of these analytics services provide a map where the user can view the frequency of visitors in various locations around the globe, the interactive map feature on Google Analytics is one of the best that I’ve seen so far.

• Content Overview – Provides a table which shows a ranking of the top pages that are visited on your site as a percentage of all visits. If you want to verify how accurate it is, then create a website profile for the same site that does not block your own I.P. address, then manually records how many times you visit your own site, and verify your number of visits with Google’s data report.

• Segmented Data – allows the user to segment their data by user type, source, browser, among many others. The two segments that I tend to use the most is the location segment (country, city, state) and the Network Location, which I have given an example of in the pdf links below:

City-Segment (example)

Network-Location-Segment (example)

Price you Pay

• Fueling the Power of the Darkside – People in the internet marketing community seem to trust this data collecting powerhouse about as much as they would trust a puppy not to pee on the carpet. By giving Google access to your site’s analytical data you are giving them more information about you and your company, which can no doubt be used against you in the future when you form a rebel alliance to take down the evil empire. If you want to know more about this evil empire, read Danny Glover’s post in the SEOmoz blog: The Evil Side of Google?
  

• Some Technical Issues – Word in the analytical community is that Google has worked out most of the kinks with their goal conversion feature, but I still have my doubts in the tools accuracy.

Site Meter

Best Features:

• Ease of Navigation – SiteMeter’s menu was one of the easiest ones to navigate out of all of the website analytics providers I have covered so far. Some of the other analytics providers, especially Google, should have gone through a more intensive testing process for the ease of navigation among normal users, not the designers. Maybe they should give Robot Replay a try. The different resources and features available for users are broken up into nice and neat categories. There is no detailed or complicated drop down menu, which helps a beginner avoid feeling overwhelmed. SiteMeter even has a tour that that explains how to find and use the different features. What’s even better is that the tour’s explanations are given in such a beginner-oriented method, that even my dog seemed to understand……”good boy.”

• Recent Visitor Details – Once again, with other website analytics services I had it took me a while to find certain pieces of information about my visitors, especially specific details. You probably won’t have a problem finding this information on SiteMeter though, because it’s right where it should be, in the recent visitors category. After you navigate to the visitor details, SiteMeter provides you with an extensive summary of most of the information you need for a particular visitor of interest…… all on one page!! What a great concept.

• Statistics Help – Staying true to the theme of making their Analytics Service as easy to understand as possible, SiteMeter even includes a statistics help box at the bottom of each page of data.

Price You Pay

• Limited Features – The only downside to SiteMeter’s free package does not include a majority of the features that are available through the other packages. What’s even worse is some of SiteMeter’s competitors, like Google Analytics and StatCounter, offer a free package that includes many of the features SiteMeter makes you pay extra for.

• IP Filter Problems – The free package also only lets you filter one IP address, but seems to have trouble filtering even that IP from your visitor results.

Robot Replay

Best Features

• Mouse Gestures: You can record visitor’s mouse gestures. This feature can really help you determine if your visitors are having any navigation issues, and how easy it is for them to find their destination in as few clicks as possible (i.e., how high or low is the level of cognitive processing for the visitor) Mouse gestures should also be able to help you determine which parts of your website are causing them to pack up their bags and leave.

• Form Replay: Lets you record and watch visitors who fill out forms. Pretty self explanatory.

Price You Pay

• Compatability Issues – Robot Replay does not appear to be 100% compatible with other website analytics programs.

• Beta – RR is still in the beta, so there are a number of obvious kinks that the designers still need to work on.

So, since a chunk of my blog had become passively-aggressive toward Ludge, I figured I could use it as a tool to maybe make stop reading it once and for all.  Of course, this wasn’t exactly easy…because if I made him not read the blog, he wouldn’t read the blog and I couldn’t use my statcounter to keep a half assed eye where he was.   And he wouldn’t know how I was doing..that I was ok and have a job (sort of) and am sleeping with a three-nippled rock star (that’s the passive aggressive part). The horror!

But I did it anyway. I was open and honest and he read it (thanks statcounter!) and he hasn’t checked since.  Foot, gun, shoot.  But I think I’ll feel better about it as soon as I stop feeling like a complete tool.

I have had over 7000 hits on this blog since joining WordPress.  If you are not a subscriber to WordPress then you need to (do it, Corey, now…).