If I’m ever setting up a project in StatCounter, the first thing I’ll do is set a blocking cookie. A few people I know have been amazed at some of their early days statistics, so many page views!!
But wait, only one unique? What happened there? Well, they love their website so much that they keep going back to it, keep refreshing pages during testing, unknowingly overinflating their traffic stats. When I’m viewing statistics on a web project I don’t need or want to know how many times I hit it (my lack of sleep would usually by a good indicator) – I want to see how often OTHER people have been there.
So as I said, in the case of StatCounter, you can use a blocking cookie. But how do you do this? Well, the steps are easy.
- Go to StatCounter.com and log in with your username and password.
- You will be presented with a list of your existing projects, under the blue ‘My Projects’ heading click the link for ‘Blocking Cookie’ (4th link)
- Click the ‘Create Blocking Cookie For All Projects’ button.
That, as they says, is that. If you wish to start tracking your own visits again, repeat said steps only when you return to the blocking cookie screen the next time you will be prompted to ‘Destroy’ the blocking cookie. This can also be done by completely emptying your browser/cookie cache.
I currently use a combination of StatCounter and Google Analytics across all my blogs with StatCounter.com now tracking 17 separate projects.
Update: Cheers Sean
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