Okay, I have received several emails asking me to share the wealth about seeing who checks my site. Shannon talked about one of her favorite tracking sites on her blog a while back and this is the same thing. I use Stat Counter. It's free. You just sign up for an account. You can choose if you want a counter to show up on your blog page for all to see, or if you want to keep it invisible so just you can access it. When you answer all the questions it will give you an HTML code that you enter into your blog. For blogger/blogspot accounts, you just go to "add page element" on your settings tab (where you go to add sidebar stuff) and enter the code into a sidebar element. Use the HTML option. If you don't give that element a name, then nothing shows up on your sidebar anywhere, but the code will be in there.
Then stat counter will start collecting the info. You log onto statcounter.com to see the data. It will tell you the IP address of people who visit which also gives you an approximate location. It isn't totally accurage because servers are located all over the place, but it is cool to see the variety. You can see how many "hits" you get a day, but be aware that every time YOU access your site, it will count it. So on days you are messing with your layout and keep clicking "preview" you will get tons of hits. You can also click on "recent keyword activity" to see what google searches have led people to you, like I did yesterday. It also tells you where people linked to your site from. So if people have your blog addy on their site and they click on it, you can see that they came from so-and-so's site.
You have the ability to label people's IP addresses so you know WHO is visiting you, but I didn't bother doing that. I just labeled my own IP address so I know which visits are my own.
Have fun!
6 comments:
I barely can even do this blog thing - checking things would be over the top for me. But it is cool how this whole computer thing works - it's all a miracle to me:)
That's pretty amazing. I like to call people like this creepers. And I know for a fact that I have a couple of creepers lurking around in my life. Good to know that I can track them. (Insert evil laugh here) haha.
That's so interesting...but I feel a little like Candy in this area. I think I'll just leave well enough alone:)
hey, I've tried statcounter, but found that it wasn't as good as GoStats. You should try it too!
also thank you for the referral to statcounter. It's much better than sitemeter (what I had been using).
I keep checking my "keyword activity" and nothing has popped up yet! I guess I'm just not very popular among the search engines.
Hey, thanks for the tips on the stats...kind of fun.
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