Statcounter vs. Sitemeter
Published Tue, Mar 13 2007 8:41 AM
Technorati Tags: Blogging
I use both the Statcounter and the Sitemeter site tracking services. I also keep track of the statistics that my ISP provides. Not one of these services agrees with the others.
My ISP tracks every single HTTP request. That's useful if I want to see what images somebody's loaded or if I'm looking to find out what kind of traffic I'm actually seeing in terms of bandwidth, but it's somewhat of a pain to wade through the logs manually. Plus, the logs aren't always up to date, since IIS doesn't flush it's buffers after every write to the log. That means that there could be quite a while before the most recent traffic shows up in them.
Statcounter and Sitemeter are a bit more useful. They only count hits where their code is executed or their static image is downloaded. But they provide a lot of summary and statistical information about the traffic and they geocode the IP addresses too. They also allow me to block specific ranges of IP addresses so that the traffic I see doesn't include me.
I like the way that Statcounter provides some of their breakdowns better than the way that Statcounter does. Some of their reports are pretty useful, and I really like their mashup of the geocoding data and google maps.
I like Sitemeter's graphs somewhat better than Statcounter's graphs, although Statcounter does give you more graphing options. I also like the fact that when you download data from Sitemeter, you get the geocoding data as well. Statcounter doesn't let you download the geocoding data.
What I don't like, about the two services is that they don't agree with each other very well. About two months ago, I reset my Statcounter counter to match my Sitemeter counter. For one reason or another, Sitemeter consistently scores more "hits" than Statcounter. Over two months the counters have diverged by almost 500 hits.
From my personal experience when reading comments or news on my site, Statcounter's counter frequently fails to load. That bothers me a bit. I'm paying for a premium account on both services, and Statcounter is costing me more than Sitemeter, but the service seems a bit less reliable.
They've done some upgrades to their service lately, but I don't know that it justifies the extra cost. One of them's going to go soon. I don't really need both services, so I don't think I want to keep paying for them both.
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Aodhan Cullen responded with: Apologies for the downtime!
 | Hi Perri,
I apologise for the downtime you experienced with StatCounter. One of our servers were being hammered by a super popular website for a short time and it was slowing the service down for some users.
We resolved the issue as quickly as possible, and we are working on upgrading our hardware infrastructure so problems like this won't ever happen again.
If there are any features you would like to see added to StatCounter as we improve the service do let us know!
thanks for the support,
Aodhan
StatCounter CEO |
Perri Nelson responded with:
 | I don't know if it's true that SiteMeter is placing tracking cookies on visitors computers or not for a third party service. If they are, that's not a good thing.
However I don't allow anonymous comments on this blog.
The anonymous comment claiming that Sitemeter had sold out has been deleted for violating my comment policy. |
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