Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Track Your Stats

Yo Bloggers! This one is for you. I wanted to go through some of the ways you can track the stats on your blog. Its kinda cool to be able to see who is visiting your blog (by IP address), how many people are seeing it, and where they come from before they checked out your blog. I will focus on 2 different stat counters over the next two days: StatCounter and GoogleAnalytics.

StatCounter: my personal favorite is the site simply called: StatCounter. It is a really easy site to use and it gives you pretty sweet information. All you need to do is setup an account with them using an e-mail address (preferably your junk mail address - if you don't have an e-mail for purely junk mail purposes, I suggest creating one). Just go through the simple steps to setup your account. You will then be prompted to put a little script on your blog. Just go to your blog's "layout" page, add a gadget, add "html" script, paste what StatCounter provides and you are set. The last thing to remember is to create a "blocking cookie" which will make it so that whenever you check out your site it won't count you. This is important so you don't get blown up numbers. Here are some examples that I took from my account at StatCounter:

Look at those numbers! whew - I should be making money off this thing.


Clicking on the "visitor paths" link on the left side of the screen brings up this window:

This information is good because it gives you a visitor-by-visitor breakdown of who is seeing your site, where they are from (IP addresses can be used to find the general physical location of that person's computer) and where they came from.

A cool thing is that you can even see the types of internet browsers people are using when they look at your site. You will notice, of course, that mostly Firefox is used!


Well, there you go, that's StatCounter. I will be back tomorrow with a post on Google Analytics. Until then...

2 comments:

Natalie said...

I like this one a lot. It is a very smart program. It gives tons of info about who visits your sites and I personally like the cool graphs.

Derek said...

Dude this is awesome. I was actually going to ask you about something like this because I wanted to get some stats going on my new blog. Thanks for the idea, I'll definitely be using it.