Sitemeter vs. Hitbox - by Brad on 20:39 05 Aug 2002
Stats trackers are very important for every webmaster. With some good stats trackers you can tell: who is visiting, how they are finding you, what keywords they use, who is linking to you, what your most popular pages are.
Here are two free trackers that:
1. can be password protected so that only you can read the stats.
2. can cover all pages of a website.
Sitemeter http://sm6.sitemeter.com/default.asp has a basic free stats package. It tracks the last 100 visitors with very basic stats. The nice part is that Sitemeter uses one code for all pages, so you do not have to create a new unique tracker for each individual page. You can also get a paid upgrade which trakes many more things. While in the free service you do have a little graphic on your site it is pretty non-commercial. It can be password protected so that only you have access to your traffic stats. I keep using Sitemeter because of these features. Recommended.
Hitbox http://www.hitbox.com/ is a very popular service that I used on several sites for a number of years.
They offer many different reports in nice graphical formats. Unfortunately these often take a long time to load. You do have to create a unique counter code for each page of your site which is a pain for large sites. You can password protect you account for privacy.
The bad part is that Hitbox requires a rrather large graphic on your page, which they use to serve up advertising to your visitors. Also they have started to beta test serving popups to sites in some topical categories! I suppose you can pay to not have this. But Hitbox also missses lots of visitors when their servers get busy. It is not worth it. Pass.
Stats trackers are very important for every webmaster. With some good stats trackers you can tell: who is visiting, how they are finding you, what keywords they use, who is linking to you, what your most popular pages are.
Here are two free trackers that:
1. can be password protected so that only you can read the stats.
2. can cover all pages of a website.
Sitemeter http://sm6.sitemeter.com/default.asp has a basic free stats package. It tracks the last 100 visitors with very basic stats. The nice part is that Sitemeter uses one code for all pages, so you do not have to create a new unique tracker for each individual page. You can also get a paid upgrade which trakes many more things. While in the free service you do have a little graphic on your site it is pretty non-commercial. It can be password protected so that only you have access to your traffic stats. I keep using Sitemeter because of these features. Recommended.
Hitbox http://www.hitbox.com/ is a very popular service that I used on several sites for a number of years.
They offer many different reports in nice graphical formats. Unfortunately these often take a long time to load. You do have to create a unique counter code for each page of your site which is a pain for large sites. You can password protect you account for privacy.
The bad part is that Hitbox requires a rrather large graphic on your page, which they use to serve up advertising to your visitors. Also they have started to beta test serving popups to sites in some topical categories! I suppose you can pay to not have this. But Hitbox also missses lots of visitors when their servers get busy. It is not worth it. Pass.