Let me first say, that anonymous data collection is not a bad thing. And if companies can provide services for free, based on anonymous data collection, then more power to them, I say.
This is about page tracking, and analysis. Answer the question, ‘Who is visiting my site?’ You also get data helping you know what sort of things they do once they have arrived. Years ago the best tools for this was webtrends, and for those who could not afford it, or who’s host did not have it pre-installed, there was the option of weblogsfrom the server. If you could not get those, the last thing you could do was build your own tracking, by adding code to each page, and storing the results yourself. Of course that required a lot of analysis to make it at all useful.
Here are the top free solutions:
- Google Analytics - The leader in statistics, mostly because of the tie in with AdWords. But this free solution offers 5M impressions, much more then the rest, but the downside is that it does not offer real time statistics.
- W3Counter – Another free alternative. I think this has the best graphics of any of the competitors. Very easy to set up & configure.
- StatCounter – Free and accurate, with real time statistics. This is an excellent tool.
Feel free to use more then on, I often do.
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