20 October 2008

Using Statcounter with blogspot blogger

Statcounter is an excellent free visitor tracker which is perfect for small to medium websites and blogs. It is particularly easy to install Statcounter on a blogspot blog and there are instructions on the Statcounter website. Sometimes it can be useful though to learn a little about such software before you sign up so that you know if it's worth while trying so here is a quick run down on using Statcounter to track page views on a blogger blog.

Once signed up with Statcounter you are able to create a project for each one of your blogs or websites where you want to track visitors. This is very simple and consists mainly of entering the website or blog address.

Stacounter then generates a short piece of Javascript which is what you put into your website or blog. In generating the code you will be able to decide if a visible website visitor counter will be shown. If you wish you can choose to make an invisible visitor counter.

On blogger the simplest way to put the code on your website is to use a HTM/Javascript widget. Then it is simply a case of pasting the Javascript code into the box. In a blog the code is pasted in as a section of script. If you are doing this I would recommend that you place the code in the footer area.

Once the code is in Statcounter will start to track each time someone visits your site. It will record their IP address and which pages they accessed. Statcounter poses no risk to your visitors because it stores no personal information about visitors. However for you as the blog or website owner the information it provides is invaluable.

You will know how many visitors you are getting and where they are coming from. You will learn what searches brought those visitors to your site. You will know which of your pages are popular and how people travel around your pages. This helps considerably if you are trying to target certain pages.

I have never hesitated to recommend Statcounter. There are more sophisticated visitor tracking systems available of course but for a completely free system which is easy to use it's hard to beat Statcounter.

2 comments:

Megan Raines said...

thank you this was very helpful!

DannyG said...

Thank you that was a helpful overview of Statcounter for me. I think I will use it.