StatCounter review

To help get a true idea about the traffic patterns for my websites, the other day I registered with a website called StatCounter and added the code to five of my websites including this one.

I like the amount of detail available from clearly seeing things such as visitors’ traffic patterns and the top downloaded files, but for some reason I still cannot get it to work with my WordPress websites.

The first website I added StatCounter to was my Florida Project site.  It was very easy to install, and since it’s one of my busiest websites, I saw the results almost immediately.  I love the details about the visitors and how they navigate through my websites and how long they look at every page.

In addition to seeing how they get to the website, I also know if they’re interested in other parts.  And as I’ve seen, I now know where to concentrate the future updates to help satisfy their interests.

I than added it to my other Joomla website, Intruder Prevention (– UPDATE – I no longer own or maintain www.IntruderPrevention.com), and that also worked.

So far, so good.

The problems arose when I added the program to this website, Local, State & National, and my other WordPress website.  I know for a fact that traffic is going through those sites, but nothing has been registered at StatCounter.

I followed the instructions for running WordPress on your own server, but nothing has been registered.  I also changed one of my websites and put the script in the footer to see if that would work, but again, nothing has been registered.  It’s a bit frustrating since I’m following the website’s instructions and advice from people in the forum.

I’ll just have to do a little bit more research and see if there’s anything else that I can do to get it working.

The other odd problem is that StatCounter is reporting twice as many visitors to my Florida Project site than reported on the Awstats log provided by my server.  The number of page loads is pretty close to even in both reports, but one of them is showing twice as many visitors than the other.  Other people in the forum have said that the problem is most likely from adding StatCounter twice in the code, but I know for a fact that I added it only once.  As I stated before, that was the first website that I added the program to and I got results almost immediately, so I wouldn’t have had any reason to mess with the program.

Something tells me that anti-script programs in some browsers may be interfering with logging programs such as that one.  I know that it stops my banners from being displayed at times since those are all scripts and not just .gif or .jpg images with embedded links.

I do like StatCounter and I may advance beyond the free membership part of the program, but I need to get everything working correctly before I do so.  At this point it’s already significantly better than anything I’ve seen at Google Analytics.