Bloggers' Paradise

jacquie · Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 11:56 pm Post subject: Tracking with StatCounter

What you need to do is use a counter that also provides stats such as statcounter . There are other services and I hope other members will chime in with their recommendations.

I like statcounter because it is free and doesn't make you put ads on your site.

Anyway, when you register you are given code to put on the pages you want to track. You can choose to have a visible counter that tells you how many visitors you have had and there are lots of styles and colours to choose from, or you can have an invisible tracker. I have the visible one on my main blog page and invisible ones on other pages.

Once that is set up when you log into statcounter it will show you all sorts of interesting stuff about your visitors, such what country and city they are in, what browser they are using, where they linked to you from (one of the most interesting items!) and so on. It can't tell you exactly who they are but if you know who is likely to visit you you can make an educated guess at which set of data belongs to who.

One final thing to note is that you can tell it to ignore an IP address, so you can, in particular, stop your own visits to your blog from falsely bumping up the count.

An easy way to find out what your IP address is by going to

http://whatismyipaddress.com/ and it tells you right there at the top of the page.

Good luck with this - please ask for clarification of any bits I haven't explained properly.

It really is fun to see where people are finding you from.

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Jo028 · Joined: 20 Feb 2007 Posts: 7 Location: West Mids, UK.

Jacquie, I've recently started using stat counter. Every day I have to enable the blocking cookie as it's logging all of my visists to every page. Do you have any idea why it's not saving it??

It tells me it's blocking, then next time I look it tell me my visits are being logged, it's very annoying!

tia

Jo

jacquie · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 12:28 pm Post subject:

To be honest I had never noticed the blocking cookie option before! I block mine via the Edit Settings link.

Either way, the problem is most likely that your ISP changes your IP address on a regular basis - even everyday - as a security measure, and there isn't really a way for StatCounter to keep tabs on that.

If you go to the Edit Settings option and look under the IP Blocking bit, it says "You can specify your IP Address". The number that follows is your actual IP address. Try tracking what that value is over a few days and see if it changes regualarly. Iif it remains in a particular range you can block that whole range, but you may block other legitimate addresses in the process. If it appears to be completely random then unfortunately there is not much you can do.
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Jo028 · Joined: 20 Feb 2007 Posts: 7 Location: West Mids, UK.

Thankyou, I'll have a dabble at that. I didn't know IP addresses could be changed, I thought they were set & that's how they find weirdo's downloading nasties (not that I'm one of those Very Happy

)