One of the first things I did when I made my first website was to add a hit counter to the bottom of every page. Do you remember seeing those? They were little tags that said: This page has been viewed 000210 times since January 11, 1994. Every time you went to the page or refreshed it, the counter would go up.

The technology to do that is very simple but what it represents is very compelling. When your content is on the web you gain the ability to see how that content is being used instantly. This information goes above and beyond seeing what your “circulation” is.  Back in the day your hit count was the magic number, but these days we have far more powerful tools at our fingertips.

Hit counters have become obsolete for a few reasons. One of those is lack of context. A hit counter only tells you the number of times a page has been loaded or refreshed, also called “pageviews.” This leaves out the bigger picture. Imagine that your hit counter reads “500 pageviews since last Friday.” This could mean you have 5 very avid readers who have looked at that page 100 times during the week. Or it could mean you have 500 visitors who looked at your site once and never came back. A hit counter alone can’t provide that insight.

Because they are inherently  meaningless, having a hit counter shown on your site is a little bit tacky. It is a remnant from a much older Internet and it fails to provide useful information to your visitors. It’s time to let the hit counter go and start using the new hotness.

Several companies provide comprehensive stat tracking through small JavaScript blocks that are placed on each page you want to track. Typically I place this in the header or footer of a site which usually is reproduced on every page automatically.

The JavaScript code uses cookies to identify unique visitors and can track their browsing habits as they move throughout your site. This opens up a whole world of info as you can now see the path that a visitor will take from their point of entry (which could be your home page, a content page, or even you 404 page *gasp*) through the site and finally to their point of exit. Is there a particular page that seems to be causing your visitors to flee? Perhaps you can rework the content to keep them around.

These stat trackers also provide information about the systems that your visitors are using most. If more of your visitors are using the Opera web browser you want to make sure that you are testing your layouts in Opera. Thinking of putting some Flash content up? Check to see what the most common Flash version is. Having this information available and using it can keep you from alienating your visitors.

There are two stat tracking services that I have used extensively. They each have strengths and weaknesses. Both are free at the moment and allow you to track multiple websites (domains) from the same interface. To use them you must be able to add custom JavaScript code to every page of your site.

Google Analytics - Google bought the Urchin Web Analytics company and made it a free service. They have since rebuilt its interface and made it an extremely easy to use and powerful tool for monitoring web stats.

It is well integrated with Google Adsense an Adwords, so if you are already using those services you will find a host of tools to help you track your keywords and ad performance.

Analytics also provides a sophisticated goal tracking system. This allows you to define a preset path through your site and attach monetary values to the eventual target. With a bit of work this can be applied to an ecommerce site and would allow you see how a particular marketing campaign was working with a real world dollar amount.

reinvigorate - The upstart in the web stats space is reinvigorate. The interface is similar to Google’s however there is a stronger focus on up to the minute monitoring of data. Default timespans for the various views are hours and days as opposed to weeks and months in Analytics.

To further support this focus, reinvigorate provides a desktop application called Snoop. Snoop, connects to the reinvigorate service and provides realtime notification of traffic on your sites.

reinvigorate also allows you to track individual users of your site at a very fine-grained level. For example, if you were running a forum you can configure the JavaScript to tag your visitors based on their username. The stats data could then show the individual paths of those users through the forum highlighting their favorite topics, with their username attached.

The reinvigorate is still in beta and requires a beta invite to participate. This is evidenced in the Snoop application which tends to disconnect form the server randomly. This greatly reduces the value of a set and forget website monitoring application. 

Each service provides a set of compelling features and handles the job of presenting comprehensive site data to you in a clean and consistent way. Depending on your site strategy this information can help you to keep visitors on your site longer, move them to important information more quickly, and meet their specific needs. Whether you are a small blog site looking for an audience or a large corporation trying to connect with your community, the point is, you are now in control of a wealth of data that will make your site a better place for your visitors and more productive for you.

Depending on the feedback to this post, I’ll make it a two or three-parter and get down to the nuts and bolts of installing the tracking code and working with some of the advanced features. If you want that, just leave a comment down there.

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