I like free stuff. If I can find useful free stuff, all the better! One such tool that I use every day on all of my products is StatCounter. This is a great free resource that will help you keep up with site statistics. Now, I know there are more sophisticated systems that are available, but StatCounter provides the best information for free. There are certainly limitations, as with any free resource, but they are easily overcome. One of the most significant limitations is your log size on the free account. Recently, the log size has increased from 100 entries to 500 entries. That is, the account will only keep track of your last 500 visitors. That is a pretty significant log, which makes it possible to see at least short term trends in your traffic.

Here is some of the useful information that you can harvest from your StatCounter account:

• Number of visitors to your site
• Popular pages on your website
• Where your visitors came from
• Keyword analysis–what search terms lead people to your page?
• Search engine comparisons–which search engine sends you more traffic?
• How long are visitors staying on your page?
• How many return visitors do you get?
• IP of visitors, with service provider
• Location of visitors
• Browser visitors are using
• Resolution and system information

This information is immensely valuable. You can use it to track ad campaigns, and make sure that your advertising dollars are well spent. After all, if no one is following your links, then why pay for them? You can also make design decisions based on the information provided. While it is ideal to build sites so that they look appropriate in all browsers, sometimes you just won’t be able to do it (unless, perhaps, you are a professional web designer, or programmer). If most of your visitors use one particular browser, you need to make sure that your sites look right in their browser.

You can also maintain multiple projects on one account with StatCounter. This is a great feature because you can keep an eye on a summary of all of your sites on one screen. If you are maintaining several different sites, you will know instantly which sites are popular, and which are not. You can easily make decisions about where to put your greatest efforts.

If you don’t have a way to keep up with all these valuable stats, then be sure and check out StatCounter. I think you will be very pleased with what is offered.