I was introduced to Statcounter last year as an impressive solution to website visitor tracking for free. I was slow to incorporate it but it turned into an invaluable tool. I could see which keywords through which people were coming to my website, giving me the clues of what to optimize for. I discover new keyword phrases and got an accurate image of how many daily visitors were coming, how long they stayed and what they did on my site.
Just this month of January I heard about Hit Tail and since there was a paid service upgrade, I thought it should be better. I subscribed to the upgrade and what did I discover? The upgrade is PER SITE. That means that I’d have to pay $10 per month, per site. For guys like me that have a lot of sites, that’s a lot of cash. I thought to myself, “well if it’s really good tracking software, that $10 a month could be worth it if it helps me make more…”
So I gave Hit Tail the benefit of the the doubt. One week later and the damn thing doesn’t have any results to display. What a piece of garbage. At least I didn’t get anxious and excited so I only lost $10 instead of closer to $100 for some of my other sites to be included.
I’m happy to say I’ve gone back to an old love, Statcounter. She’s free, and I can use her on lots of sites. Sure, her log is limited, but I can always just restart the project when I want a new log.
Here’s a secret for getting more out of Statcounter: Create a different project for each element of your site, not just the same code on all pages. For example, I split my site into having a home page project, and having a blog project since all my active sites have blogs. This doubles my log size. Also be sure to enable the blocking cookie against yourself so your own visits don’t get logged and eat up your log space.