Alternatives To Sitemeter?
September 14th, 2008 by joe
The “new” Sitemeter has been unveiled and, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work. Following the fiasco earlier this year I am somewhat hesitant to trust it, anyway. (By the way, anyone viewing this on Internet Explorer? I’d like to hear some confirmation it still works).
Does anyone know anything about other solutions for traffic measurement and referral tracking? I’ve got a backend program running on the server but it’s too much of a chore to have to log in and view it and it is not current (cron job that runs once a day I believe). I’d rather have something directly accessible from the Web.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds is soliciting the same info and chances are he will get more replies than me, so check that link periodically for updates.
I think Statcounter is another popular program but I don’t think it offers “open” stats (i.e. anyone can just click and see the stats without logging in) which is important to me for reasons of sheer laziness. And transparency.
FYI note to my fellow bloggers: If/when we switch away from Sitemeter, we will lose traffic data on all of the old Movable Type pages. Adios, sayanara, poof! all gone. It’s only 80-150 visits a day, and the vast majority are just Google searches, but please brace yourselves.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Bloggers, Site Housekeeping. 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.
September 14th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
It does not crash in I.E.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
“statcounter” is alright, certainly is more user friendly than the sitemeter “improvement”. Not sure if you can start statcounter at a number you set though.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I have used http://www.google.com/analytics/ . Been very pleased with the reporting available, what it collects, the ease of accessing data sets, and exporting that data.
From what I have seen, google analytics is the best of breed.
September 14th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Sitemeter’s seen the error of their ways and are currently rolling back to the old way of doing things.
September 14th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
I thought Analytics only updated once a day, which is a dealbreaker because you need to have live stats. If that is not the case I will definitely look into it.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Joe, curiosity ?, why do you need realtime stats ?
September 14th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Good question! From a blog guy to a Web guy:
Real time stats allow you to see throughout the day who is sending you traffic, who is linking to you. Knowing this lets you know what stuff on your blog is attracting attention which sometimes can mean huge changes in traffic, but more importantly it allows you to acknowledge and reciprocate if you find someone is sending you traffic.
September 15th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Joe, I am catching you on Internet Explorer. However, I’m about as good at this computer/internet stuff as John McCain and don’t have a flippin’ clue what a Sitemeter is. In any case, I did notice that the Loudoun Community Association blog has just about disappeared except for the heading. Could what you are describing be the cause for this disappearance?
September 15th, 2008 at 1:36 am
The LCA blog just came back on the screen. It was out for the last day or two. Question still stands.