website review: Sitemeter.com
Pros/Things I like
-The service is free.
-It’s been around for years, and (from what I can tell) has been fairly reliable.
-They record various data about your site’s visitors, including what browser they use, screen resolution, etc.
-My favorite feature is the “last 100 referrers” to my websites. To me, where my visitors are coming from is at least as important as how many total visitors I receive. None of the other counters that I’ve tried offered this. (Although, to be honest, it’s been years since I added a counter, or tried any new counter service. The current offerings may vary.)
Cons/Limitations/Things I don’t like
-I think it does require registration.
-If your page receives only few visitors over a long period of time, they will cancel your counter for inactivity.
-Their reliability may be more questionable than I thought. See below.
Additional Comments
I have 8 or so Sitemeter counters, because of the Pros listed above. However, last month, the Sitemeter counter recorded zero weekly visitors for a site that had more than that. [My website host also tracks the number of visitors to my pages… but I leave the Sitemeter for convenience and comparison.] This made me check my other Sitemeters… and some, but not all of them, were doing the same thing.
Seeing that this was happening, I briefly considered looking for a new counter. Ultimately lack of time made me opt to wait and see what happened.
I checked again this weekend, and all of the counters that had been stuck at zero were working again.
But! I decided to make a note of the current stats, for my records, just in case they went down again, or ultimately disappeared. And for one of my larger sites, I had previously made a note of the stats back on March 8, 2010. I found the difference quite interesting.
Total Visits as of September 21, 2013: 229,969
Total Visits as of March 8, 2010: 230,983
So…in over three years, my site has had negative 1,000 visitors? o.O
As I said above, I’m left wondering whether Sitemeter’s service is less reliable than I thought. Still, for now, the bottom line is that I’ll continue using them. I just take the data they produce with an even bigger grain of salt!
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