Counting on thecounter.com

How often are you in those meetings where questions about Web site use come up, like “What percentage of come to our site?” and “How does that compare with what the rest of the world sees?”

How often are you in those meetings where questions about Web site use come up, like “What percentage of come to our site?” and “How does that compare with what the rest of the world sees?”

Sure, you can invest in a Web stats analysis package but for many sites that is overkill – you need the basics and you need ’em fast and cheaply.

There is no end of companies offering outsourced Web site statistics gathering that vary wildly in price. Here’s another source that you may not have come across: thecounter.com, owned by Jupitermedia (see links below) that is cheap and effective.

Thecounter.com uses counters (you know, as used in those “You are the Xth person to visit this site” kind of thing that tells the world just how thin your traffic is) that also collect lots of information about the browser and client environment.

Thecounter.com actually offers four kinds of “counters” – there’s a simple number (you can configure its colors and so on), two graphics that proclaim you use thecounter.com (one with a counter) and a fourth that is a single invisible pixel.

Underlying the counters are chunks of JavaScript that are basically chains of scripted conditionals that result in the loading of a counter from a specific URL. The URL tells thecounter.com what the client environment and browser consists of. Thecounter.com tallies the hits and provides you with the stats for your site.

Obviously clients that don’t have JavaScript support can’t be analyzed in depth but if you are looking to optimize your site for the majority of your audience then the data gathered by thecounter.com is a good guide to what their profile looks like.

The service costs $21.95 and provides you with weekly stats e-mailed to you and monthly reports via thecounter.com Web site.

Another useful feature of thecounter.com is the “global” statistics for the entire collection of sites that use its services. These stats are available for free as summaries delayed by three months.

For May, the total number of visits to thecounter.com sites was 38,113,581 (the total number of sites isn’t available) and according to the figures, Microsoft IE 5+ accounted for 93% of browsers with Netscape browsers adding up to 4%. Sine 86% of browsers were running JavaScript 1.2+ and 84% had Java enabled.

So if you need figures on Web browsing, this is a useful albeit unscientific source.