All webmasters would want to have information about how many hits, visitors and pages being viewed on his website, Tech4idiots for one used to check the stats almost religiously, but as time went by I would only check the stats from time to time just to see the trends and number of visitors each week, So here in this article I listed my TOP 5 Stat Trackers for your website.

 

5. Compete

 

Compete provides its users with analytical information and also allows anyone the ability to view statistical information on websites that Compete has crawled and been added to their database, its services are quite similar to that of Alexa. User can compare information of up to three websites and up to five websites for registered users.

Here are the main features of Compete:

• Provides information on analytics and general statistics.
• Anyone can view information about a website.
• Branches out into different self service tools.
• Information they provide is based on a sample number of people’s internet activity

Advantages

• Provides good information on statistics
• No need to install anything
• Information can be viewed just by visiting their website and entering your websites address

Disadvantages

• It not as accurate as those from Google Analytics and WordPress Stats
• If you want to get more in depth information you need to pay a fee to be able to view them.
• Only basic information is available for free users.

Check out their website here: http://www.compete.com/

 

 

 

4. Alexa Web Information

 

Alexa is a great stat tool for your website, the difference is that it’s called a public stat system. The main advantage is that there is no need for you to install anything on your server, once your website has been crawled information is readily available on the Alexa website.Alexa also has their own traffic ranking system which they can categorized by country/ local area or worldwide.

Main Features of Alexa:

• Public Stat monitoring system
• Provides demographic information
• Has their own Traffic ranking system.

Advantages

• Information on website are update automatically
• No need to install or sign-up to anything.
• Updated regularly

Disadvantages

• It’s not the most accurate stat trackers
• Information it provides is not as in depth as others.
• Stats are only update every one or two days.
• Stats gathered for websites are only from users who has the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser (need citations)
• Alexa’s ranking can be easily Manipulated. (Rumor)
• Alexa’s own traffic system does really nothing to your actual SERPs

Check out Tech4idiots’s Alexa stats here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tech4idiots.org

 

 

3. Woopra

 

Woopra is a little similar to Google Analytics, this is because they both provide an almost similar information about the websites statistics to the user. It differs from Goggle Analytics because it is split into two services: a webserver application and a desktop client program. Users are able to track users of your website and about where they go inside your website in almost an instant. This is a good tool to track your website’s bounce rate and page views per visit on your website.

Woopra features:

• Live Stat Monitoring
• Provides two services: a web server application and a desktop client program
• gives you in depth statistical information
• It has an Innovative statistics system
• The new Woopra Analytics (which I’m still familiarizing with)

Advantages

• You are able to see your stats on your desktop thanks to the Desktop Client program
• Stats are live and are updated in an instant.
• The Woopra API, with this there are a handful of plugins to integrate Woopra with your blogs and other websites.

Disadvantages

• Requires a bit of time to fully setup.
• Not as well known as Google Analytics

Check out their website here: http://www.woopra.com/

 

 

2. WordPress Stats (WordPress Plugin)

 

This tool is specifically tailored to wordpress users.

Here are the main features of WordPress Stats:

• Integrates perfectly with your website that runs WordPress.
• Provides information on keywords used to get to your site, where a user came from and what links were clicked in your website.
• A small graph is presented on your dashboard.

Advantages

• Very easy to setup.
• Perfect for WordPress websites.
• Clean presentation of information on the stats page..
• Presents a nice graph about website/page hit/views.

Disadvantages

• Only for WordPress
• Does not track unique number of visitors
• Only tracks page views.

Download the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

 

1. Google Analytics

 

For Tech4idiots, Google Analytics is so far the best Stat Tracker tool out there. Google Analytics provides a very comprehensive information about the visitors on your website. It provides in depth information, such as from where are your visitors, type of browsers use, keywords used to get to your website and these information are very helpful to the success of ones website.

Here’s a short list of what Google Analytics provides:

• Detailed graphs of the stats of your site.
• Geographical information of your visitors
• Provides statisitcs such as Site Usage and Bounce Rates.
• Content overview and Traffic overview of your website
• You can create Goals to keep track of such as improving you websites bounce rates etc..

Advantages

• In depth statistical information
• Highly accurate and details graphs
• View, update, and compared any time period about your website performance.

Disadvantages

• For new webmasters, the amount of information presented maybe overwhelming especially to new users.
• It takes time to get the hang of taking all the information presented to you.

Visit the website at: http://www.google.com/analytics/

 

 

SPECIAL MENTION:

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is a directory and community for blogger that provides statistics information to registered members who have installed the Mybloglog widget in their website. The statistics presented are not as robust as from those more popular stat tracker and are also powered by the MyBlogLog community. I would have place it as atleast at 3^rd place except that MyBlogLog has been shutdown as of May 2011.