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
This is a great feature cause i always tend to have overinflated stats for my website. do you know if google analytics or performancing or site meter have these options.
Recently I’ve started using performancing and found out they’ve got a feature I’ve been looking for in log analysis for ages. User action tracking. You can see each individual page a visitor accessed so you can easily figure out the path the visitor followed till he left the site.
Thats good depth on the stats Mike, re: user actions, allows for great user profiling.
There is a way of blocking yourself in Google Analytics but it isn’t as clear cut (or at least wasn’t) as StatCounter’s ‘create blocking cookie’ option. I’ll look at this again though!
Hi Ken,
Why both Statcounter and Google analytics? What are the unique features of each?
Thanks,
Conn
I was facing the same problem in the past with a stat tool. Then I shifted to GoStats.com , they allowed me to skip hits from particular IP address, so the first thing I did was enter my address.