Best Web Traffic tracking tools

If you owns a website, you'd be interested in how many visitors you're getting daily. But how do you track your web visitor's? Easy, by using free web counter or whatever it's called. There's a lot of such web counter available for free, and the best or most popular ones are Google Analytic, Site Meter & Extreme Tracking. So which do I think is the best? Ranking is in order, Google Analytic is my top choice in my opinion, hey it's made by Google! Not only it's made by Google, Analytic provides some of the most details information about your site visitors you'd ever seen including total unique, total pageviews, country, browser, operating system, entry page, referral...etc. Almost every details you would want to know. Compared to other web counter provider, there's only one feature that's in Site Meter that cannot be found in Google Analytic, and that's real time access report. It lets you see who is accessing your page at the moment. The only downside about Google Analytic I can think of is the Ajax intensive interface. It's not a bad thing and it looks really good, but if you have slow or unstable connection, then you'd have problem accessing it. Really, it's not a big problem, I'm only experiences a few time while using 3g connection. On the other hand, Site Meter and Extreme Tracking are using plain html page which loads a lot more faster. If you are on fast connection, then you wouldn't notice any differences.

So why there are still so many people's using site meter and extreme tracking? Well I'm not too familiar with other 2 tracker so I can't tell you much. Maybe it's easier to access because you don't have to login to see the statistic every time, but that also means you'll be sharing the information with the public. I've installed Site Meter on this blog, you can check it out at the very bottom of the page. Site Meter doesn't looks too bad, it track all important information about the visitors and its easy to access, so are you. The bad thing about site meter is that you can't track different website with the same account like google analytic, you need to sign up a new account for each site which could be troublesome. In google analytic, you can just toggle between site with a drop down list which is convenient when you have more than 2 sites. I haven't really test the accuracy of either web counter, but all three web counter are accurate in tracking visitors or so I heard.

How do you install web counter to your website? First choose your preferred tracker, then you need to sign up an account with the service provider. After you done that, just login to your account and follow the instruction to get the tracking code. Once you obtain the code, you need to put it in your site. If you are using blogger or wordpress, login to your account and find the option to modify your site code. For blogger, go to layout > Edit HTML, scroll to the very bottom and insert the code just before /body. It's the same for most open sources site. You can actually put the code anywhere you want, but it's highly recommended to put it at the very end as if something happen to the tracking code such as downtime, it won't affect your site loads. You can do the same in wordpress, just modify the footer.php in templates and save it.