First I want to say I am glad to be back over here at Wildheart’s Works. It was like not having a part of me that has become a part of my identity.
Second, I am pleased to be doing another article for Wendy over at e-moms.
In this edition I am participating in her Second Group Research Project.
Randa gave us some insight into web analytics and mentioned StatCounter.com and as I am a StatCounter.com user I thought I would expand on this aspect of web analytics. I am going to use my account for Wildheart’s Works as an example for my explaination for this.
First of course there is the registration process which is the standard process for any website.
I have the free account and this is what you get for free.
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Log-Size
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Pageloads/Month
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Price/Month
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500
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250,000
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FREE
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This is what they offer.
How does it work?
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Inside every FREE StatCounter Account you can set up a StatCounter Project..
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..and with every project you get Project Code + Log Space!
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You put your code into your webpage and every time someone visits a webpage..
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..the StatCounter Project code sends valuable information about the visitor back to your log.
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StatCounter organises all this information into charts & lists to make your analysis easier..
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..and if you have more than one site, you simply set up another StatCounter Project in the same account!
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You get four different ways to display their code into your website or blog.
This code will place a small, customisable number on your pages indicating to you and your visitors how many people have visited each page. The counter’s appearance can be adjusted using further options in this wizard.
Example:  |
| The code generated by this option will make the counter invisible, and no indication to your visitors as to how popular a particular page is. |
| This option will generate two pieces of code - one for your homepage that will display the counter there, and one for your other pages which will make it invisible. |
This option will generate code that simply displays a StatCounter button - a great way to support the site!
Example:  |
Now let’s go into my account.
Add New Project | Transfer Project | Adjust Log | Blocking Cookie
TIP To install the code - click the installation and configuration icon beside your project name.
TIP To view your stats - click the real-time stats icon beside your project name.
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Real-Time Stats and Visitor Reports
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Install Code and Customise Project Settings
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Control User Access to Project
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Schedule Email Reports
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Delete Entire Project
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As you can see the key is explained very well. My Wildheart’s Works has been viewed 80 times this month and Kansans and Friends In Weight Loss has been view 58 times this month. Now the reason this is a useful page to look at is because you can see which projects are getting better views and overall traffic than others if you have multiple projects going on. You can see what projects may need more tweaking or look into your stats to see why your doing better on one project than the other.
Lets go into my Wildheart’s Works stats.
Daily | Weekly | Monthly | Quarterly | Yearly
Now this shows a significant drop from the beginning of the current reporting period to the end. The reason being is that I haven’t been able to post much to this blog since the PC switch.
The next piece is the popular pages detail. My post about How To Get The Most Out Of Cafepress is at the top of the pile. Then there is In The Spotlight Who I Am Tagging followed by various views for people looking for paint shop pro related information.
This is where you can start to get a good idea of what posts are working for you and what posts not so good. As there is a lot of people still looking for information on Cafepress I am sure that my hits for that article will continue well into the next several months.
There are arrows indicating what is called drilling down for further information.
This is what you can look at when you drill down the data.
Recent Visitor Activity | Recent Visitor Map | Visitor Paths | Came From
When I clicked on recent activity it shows that I had three visitors last week. One came from Ontario Canada, one from Texas, and one from Connecticut. It also tells what time people viewed my pages as well. Now this is where you should pay attention if you look at your stats and your stat analysis program offers time tracking. This can help you determine when you should be putting up your best material on your web site or blog. When I look at the times people viewed my site I see a lot of folks tuning in around early afternoon and shortly before midnight. That is why I blog in the evening, because I want to get people as they are coming home from work,unwinding and getting on the PC to check email and surf the net.
The next is recent visitor map that can give you a good idea of where your visitors are coming from geographically. For me my top three countries are The United States, Canada, and Australia.
Visitor paths gives you a break down of exactly where your visitors are logging in at. It includes their IP address,there ISP provider, the date and time they came on to your site and what url they found you through you can then look into each entry and also find out the following:
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Firefox 1.5.0 |
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Windows XP |
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1024×768 |
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Enabled |
This can be useful information for people who understand screen resolution and how to set up their sites to come to a happy medium for various screen resolutions. This excerpt show that a visitor uses Firefox,is using XP and has a resolution of 1024×768 and they have Java e enabled on their system. Now this can be useful if you need to know if having Java applications on your blog or site could benefit you or harm you. If you have enough users who have Java enabled it could be a wise thing to look into how to make it work for you.
Keyword Analysis looks like this for my site
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8.99% |
4th of july psp tubes |
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5 |
5.62% |
cafepress |
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3.37% |
psp tubes 4th of july |
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3 |
3.37% |
july 4th psp tubes |
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3 |
3.37% |
cafepress template |
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3 |
3.37% |
how to tag my merchandise on cafepress |
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2.25% |
pasting design onto cafepress template |
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2.25% |
mark up cafepress |
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2.25% |
cafepress templates |
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2.25% |
paint shop pro tubes fourth of july |
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2.25% |
tripleeffect |
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2.25% |
hoverpsot |
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2.25% |
ksandfriends |
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2.25% |
4th of july psp tutorial |
You can see that psp,July and Cafepress are the top keywords people use to find what they are looking for.
Search Engine Wars can tell you how well your getting searched on the search engines.
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83.54% |
Google |
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7 |
8.86% |
Yahoo! |
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5 |
6.33% |
Google Blog Search |
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1 |
1.27% |
MSN |
You can see that Google is the most used search engine people are using when they find their way to my blog.
That just about covers what I know about this great free Stat program. If your looking for a quality,and detail orientated stat tool I recommend this one. If you have any questions feel free to email me at joecheray@gmail.com.
