Category: Statistics

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.

1. Go to StatCounter.com and log in with your username and password.
2. 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)
3. 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

Do any Irish or other bloggers have a mint and if so, at US$30 per site, how do you find it compares to the likes of Google Analytics or StatCounter when it comes to obtaining statistics, accuracy, layout and feel?

Any thoughts at all…

Looks like StatCounter (tracking all my blogs and other web projects alongside Google Analytics) have boosted the size of their logs on all free accounts from 100 entries up to 500 entries which should make the drilldown a little more interesting on busier blogs – in my case here, KilkennyMusic.com & LiverpoolAccess.com

I’ve been hoping for a while that they’d roll out some of those additional services that have been grayed out for as long as I can remember but the addition of bigger logs is a welcome one.

Via the StatCounter blog (edit: and now subsequent email as I arrive in the office).

We’re very pleased to let you know today that every StatCounter project now comes with a log size of 500 – you guessed it – FREE!

This means that you can now drill down into the detail of the last 500 pageloads on your site. And, of course, you still have LIFETIME summary stats on ALL your visitors. We took the old free log size of 100 and multiplied it by 5 to give you even more info on your visitors. Please note that this increase applies to ALL StatCounter members, and to ALL projects!

You’ll have to go in and do the log updates yourself but the blog post and email have details on how to do it within a few clicks.

Its been a while since I pointed out one of Steve Rubel’s blog posts but he makes an interesting point today in calling out for a replacement for page views and an improved system of metrics for tracking web statistics. Allen Stern at Center Networks also makes an interesting post on the death of a metric (in page views). He’s also started a wiki for it.

I’ve neglected looking at web statistics of late, barring KilkennyMusic.com as I develop a plan for 2007, but I always hold in the back of my mind that you should be monitoring your statistics in order to better serve those visiting and utilising your web site and services – thats why we have the likes of StatCounter, Mint and Analytics.

Page views is always something thats pissed me off though as a misrepresentation of how many people actually use your site. Fair enough, you know its an interesting page or article but views in no way reflect unique visitors or a strong way to measure browsing trends. If we can dig a little deepers or at least fine tune the process then we can understand a bit more about our web visitors. In the meantime though, I’ve a feeling I’ll be keeping an eye on those above posts.