Any marketer will tell you that details on who is visiting your site and where they come from / where they go / what they bought are some of the most important things that you need to know.

If you are doing SEO, you need to know where your traffic is coming from, so you know what areas you need to improve upon.

If you are doing paid advertising, it is vital that you know the conversion rates of your campaigns, otherwise you are just flushing cash down the drain.

Discussion of the metrics that can be measured is something that I am saving for another day, and is something that serious marketers spend ages discussing because it is so important.  To begin with, I would thoroughly recommend putting SOME kind of statistics program on the site, and upgrading it as you need.

Here are some of the stat counters that I have used, and their good / bad points:

So, in no particular order:

Statcounter.com

http://www.statcounter.com

A good free statcounter, with the option to be paid if you need the extra resources.  It is simple to use, and tells you most of the basic things that you will need to know.

Pros:

• Free to use
• Easy to use
• Easy to install
• Clear layout
• Several useful features
• Great for basic sites, relying on word of mouth, or basic SEO for traffic
• Good support via forum

Cons

• Stats are a bit basic
• No real way to track customers in bulk, meaning it is difficult to measure the success of a campaign

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/adsense/

As with most Google apps, this is feature rich, and does a lot of powerful things.  This is the kind of application that despite being free, puts a lot of the paid applications to shame.  It can integrate with a lot of other Google applications, which is quite helpful.  The main issue is that you have to spend quite a while working out how to use the system – not a problem if you are going to be using it for your mainframe business.

Pros:

• Free to use
• Extremely powerful analytics
• Integrates with Adwords to monitor PPC campaigns
• Works with your Google account
• Highly customisable
• Works with Ecommerce

Cons:

• Because it is feature rich to the extreme, it can be a little daunting to use for a newbie.
• Customisation for sites means that you must know the program inside out before you set the thing up to avoid making wrong choices.
• Privacy concerns – Google monitors the data that goes through their system, and uses it to work with their rankings.

Web CEO

http://www.webceo.com/

Unlike Statcounter and Google Analytics which are web based, Web CEO is a program which sits on your computer, and downloads the stats to your computer.  It is a different system, but it works.

One of the amusing things that it does is to display stats in many different ways, which are excellent for use in presentations and demonstrations.

Pros:

• Very powerful stats.
• The program not only tracks stats, but has a whole suite of website analytics which can measure all kinds of details such as the quality of the site, broken links, and how good the site does for on page SEO.  You can use this part of the program for free, without using the stat counter – something which I definitely recommend.
• Downloads the stats to your computer, so you don’t have to be online to use it.
• Wide variety of features for checking stats.
• Has a special setting to work with ecommerce sites to track conversions.

Cons:

• The stat counter aspect of it is only a 15 day trial, and then it costs a small amount a month.
• A bit finicky to set up.
• Because it is on your computer, it does make it a little more difficult to get the information when you are on other computers.

Hosting account stats:

(Access through your hosting panel)

It is worth noting that most hosting accounts have some form of stats built into them.  The results that they produce, are, shall we say ‘interesting’.  These server side counters which measure stats are not very good for the purposes of measuring traffic because the server measures any hit, including those from automated bots, search engines, and crawlers, but do have their own ups and downs which means they can occasionally be useful:

Pros:

• No installation required.
• Stats provided for on all parts of the site.
• Tells you what files are costing you the most in bandwidth – something that other stat counters can’t do.
• Comes free with your hosting account.

Cons:

• Not very accurate reporting of visits – this is due to the fact that the hosting account stats view automated bots, and missed clicks as real, which means the figure for traffic will be inflated.
• Stats are very basic, being little more than raw data.
• Can’t be exported very easily.

There are dozens if not hundreds of different stat counters out there, each with their own specialty, and way of measuring things.  We use all of the above stat counters for different tasks, and different kinds of sites.

When choosing a stat counter, it is important to know what you are trying to achieve with it and what metrics you are