Hi folks,

“Came From” Stats
Your StatCounter “Came From” stats provide you with information about how people are coming to your site.

In your “Came From” stats you will see a list of sites via which visitors come to your site. These sites which refer visitors to your site might be forums, blogs, search engines, directories or websites of any kind that provide links to your site. You may also see entries for “No Referring Link” - we’ll explain what this means in this post.

Indirect and Direct Visitors
Visitors to your website can arrive in two distinct ways. For example:

A Vistor Can Arrive at your site INDIRECTLY by:

• Clicking though to your website from a Search Engine
• Following a link to your site on a blog
• Clicking a link in a forum where someone recommends your site

OR a Visitor Can Arrive at your site DIRECTLY by:

• Typing your web address directly into their browser address bar
• Clicking a bookmarked link to your site in their browser

Indirect Visitors
If a visitor arrives at your site via a search engine, the visitor has been referred to your site by the search engine therefore you will see a referring link from the search engine in your stats.

In other words, you will only see a referring link in your stats, if a visitor has been referred to your site by another website, blog, forum or search engine.

Direct Visitors
If a visitor arrives at your site by typing your website address directly into their browser, the visitor has NOT been referred to your site by any other site, therefore you will see a “No Referring Link” entry in your StatCounter stats.

In other words, if a vistor comes to your site directly (i.e. without being referred to your site by any other site), then there is no referring link for that visitor.

No Referring Link - what’s the significance?
There are a number of reasons why you could have a high proportion of “No Referring Link” entries in your stats. For example:

• People may get to know your web address offline (e.g. in flyers or newspapers) so they simply go directly to your site rather than looking for your site in a search engine.
• You may have a lot of returning visitors who have bookmarked your site so that they can quickly revisit it.

As usual, comments, questions and suggestions welcome!

UPDATE: To ensure that all referring links are captured, you should make sure that you have StatCounter code installed on all pages of your site. It is not sufficient to have StatCounter installed on your homepage only. This is because visitors may enter your site at any page not just your homepage.

While Christmas celebrations this year may not be as elaborate as Christmases past, we want to wish you and all your families peace and happiness this festive season as well as good health and prosperity in 2010.

At StatCounter we are acutely aware of the debt of gratitude that we owe to you, our members. For your support throughout the year, for your patience and loyalty… we offer you our humble and sincere thanks.

May the New Year bring with it hope for the future and may we all leave behind us the difficulties of the last 12 months.

Folks,

Many thanks for all your responses to our recent post “Unique Visitors – Explained”. Today we’re going to try to answer your questions.

QUESTION: Could we have the option to show “Unique Visitors” on the My Projects Summary page instead of “Page Views”?

Of course! This option is already available. Please see here for more information.

QUESTION: Please explain HOW you calculate Unique Visitors?
When a visitor comes to your site for the first time, StatCounter drops a “cookie” into their browser. This cookie allows us to identify the visitor and track them as a Unique Visitor as they look at multiple pages on your site.

Here’s how it works:



QUESTION: What is a “cookie”?
A “cookie” is a small text file that we use at StatCounter to determine whether a visitor has been to your site in the recent past.

QUESTION: If a visitor visits my site 10 times within a day, is this recorded in the same way as if the visitor viewed it 10 times within a week?
This depends on the Maximum Visit Length setting for the site/project. This setting is used to calculate Unique Visits. Changing this setting allows you to define the maximum time that can elapse between page visits, while still considering that the sequence of page visits together all form one Unique Visit. This concept is easier to understand by way of example, so let’s look at this a bit more closely…

Let’s say the Max Visit Length is set to 30 minutes. Here’s how it works:


The page views of “News Today”, “Story A” and “Story B” are all considered to be part of one Unique Visit by a Unique Visitor. This is because each page view takes place within 30 minutes of the previous one.

The visit to “Story XYZ” is considered to be a separate Unique Visit by a Unique Visitor. This is because more than 30 minutes has elapsed since the previous page view on this site.

QUESTION: What value do you recommend for Maximum Visit Length and why?

We recommend setting it between 1 and 6 hours. We don’t recommend setting it to 24 hours and above. This is because an average visit to a website is likely to be a maximum of 1 to 6 hours. It is highly unlikely that a visitor will spend 24 hours on your website.

Consider a news website “NEWS Today” - let’s say someone visits this website on Monday morning to read up on the headlines. Later that evening that same person visits “News Today” to read up on some breaking news. The morning and evening visits are separate and distinct visits at different times and for different purposes. These visits are therefore considered to be separate Unique Visits.

QUESTION: What about visitors who disable cookies?
Unfortunately, when a visitor has cookies disabled, we have no way of establishing if they are a Unique Visitor or not.

Think of one Unique Visitor who visits 4 pages on your site during one single visit…

If this visitor has cookies enabled, then we can correctly track their activity and StatCounter will recognise the visitor as a single Unique Visitor who visited 4 pages on your site during their visit.

If this visitor has cookies disabled, then each of the 4 pageloads will be counted by StatCounter as a single one page visit by a Unique Visitor. Obviously, this is not strictly correct, but generally most visitors will have cookies enabled so this does give you a fairly accurate overview of your Unique Visitors.

QUESTION: But I want to know exactly how many individual people have visited my website - how do I do this?

Unfortunately there is NO foolproof way of calculating exactly how many individual people have visited a website. Each method has its limitations. For example:

• Cookie Method - This method is the one used in the StatCounter Summary Stats. The Unique Visitor count can be distorted by cookies being disabled/destroyed.
• IP Address Method - This method counts Unique Visitors based on their IP addresses. The Unique Visitor count can be unreliable due to the use of dynamic IP addresses i.e. the same person can make use of multiple IP addresses during a single visit to a site.
• Log In Method - This method counts Unique Visitors based on people accessing a site via a username and password. The Unique Visitor count can be misrepresented by people have multiple log ins for a site or by sharing log in information.

QUESTION: How far back are “Unique Visitors” kept for? Is it anyone who’s ever visited my site, ever, or just the people responsible for my last 500 pageviews (or whatever my quota is)?

Every StatCounter project offers LIFETIME summary stats. That means that you can access ALL details of ALL Page Loads/Unique Visitors/Returning Visitors right from when you started tracking with StatCounter up to the present day.

QUESTION: Does StatCounter use IP addresses to calculate Unique Visitors?
StatCounter uses cookies to calculate Unique Visitors in the Summary Stats. We use IP addresses for visitor identification purposes in other parts of the system. (We plan to post about this when we explain other terms and stats in the future.)

Sincere thanks to Car Guy for his invaluable assistance in compiling this post.

Please do comment below if anything above is unclear or if you have any further questions. Please also let us know about any errors, omissions or typos… although we try our best, sometimes mistakes do slip through so - if you spot a problem - please post a message to help us put things right ASAP. Thanks to Tom and Peter for their help with an error in our previous post!

On the support desk at StatCounter, we receive a lot of queries about Unique Visitors. This concept can be a little difficult to understand, particularly if you are new to web stats, so we’re going to try explain it here in very simple terms.

What is a Unique Visitor?
A Unique Visitor is a separate/individual/distinct visitor.

Each Unique Visitor to your site will be EITHER a first time OR a returning visitor.

How are Unique Visitors and Pageloads related?
Firstly let’s be clear on what we mean by a pageload. A pageload is a “hit” or “page view” on a site.

When one page of your site is loaded into a browser, one pageload is generated. Clicking the refresh button generates another pageload. Visiting another page on the site will generate a further pageload.

All the pageloads on your site are generated by your Unique Visitors.

Let’s imagine you have 10 pageloads on your site. This could be the result of:

>> 10 Unique Visitors - each one visited your site once


>> OR 1 Unique Visitor - who visited your site 10 times



>> OR 5 Unique Visitors - each one visited your site twice

Can you explain Unique Visitors in the Summary Stats?

Let’s look at the Summary Stats below.

On Wednesday, there were 21 pageloads. This means there were 21 hits on the site. In other words, pages on the site were loaded in browsers 21 times.

These 21 pageloads were generated by 5 Unique Visitors. This means 5 distinct/separate individuals e.g. Mark, Paul, Tom, Joe and Simon.

Of the 5 Unique Visitors who viewed the site, three of them are Returning Visitors. This means that three of the five visitors have visited the site before and returned to view it again. The remaining two Unique Visitors are therefore First Time Visitors.

How are Unique Visitors in the Summary Stats calculated?
In the Summary Stats, Unique Visitors are calculated by the use of a “cookie”. A “cookie” is a small text file that we use at StatCounter to determine whether a visitor has been to your site in the recent past.

When a visitor first looks at a page on your site, a StatCounter cookie is placed in their browser (if allowed). Then, as the visitor browses your site, the cookie tells us that this is NOT a new/distinct/separate visitor visiting your site. Instead, it’s the same visitor looking at several different pages.

You should note that it IS possible for a visitor to disable all cookies in their browser.

When a visitor has cookies disabled, cookies cannot be used to determine whether the they are a Unique Visitor or not. If a visitor has cookies disabled, then each page of your site that he views will be considered to be a pageload by a Unique Visitor. Obviously, this is not strictly correct, so the Unique Visitor count is an imperfect measure. It does, however, give you a reasonably accurate overview of your Unique Visitors.

We hope this post is helpful - if anyone has any further queries or comments, please post below! Thanks!

Hi folks,

Here is a summary of some of the latest news from StatCounter.

Ads – New Networks

Advertising revenue allows us to fund our free service. Increasing our ad revenue allows us to invest in improving the service we offer. With this in mind, we have been running some new ad networks on StatCounter lately.

Further to last month’s blog post, we’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that we strive to ensure that only high quality advertising is shown on our site. However, as different adverts are shown on StatCounter in different parts of the world, here in StatCounter HQ we don’t actually see every advert shown to our members.

We are committed to providing the best service we can to our members so, if you see an inappropriate/intrusive/offensive advert, PLEASE let us know about it. With your help, we can ensure a better experience for all our members. We require the following information to identify and remove any nuisance ads:

• Ad position - top or side
• URL where ad is being seen
• Geo location where ad was seen
• Click url of ad

If possible please also take a screenshot of the ad. Although our support system does not allow attachments for security reasons, we will contact you directly to retrieve the image from you.

SC4 Update
We know, we know… SC4 has been a long time coming but it IS coming!

When we began the beta phase of SC4, we asked for volunteers to test the service. When testing proved successful and various bugs were ironed out, we were faced with a dilemma… we had our new platform available and we had two options:

1. We could keep the new system under wraps until we were ready to convert all the existing StatCounter projects to SC4 OR
2. We could set all NEW projects created to SC4 immediately thus allowing new and existing members to benefit from the new features while we continued to work on the conversion

We chose to implement option 2 above. Although this means that we have been running two platforms side by side for over a year now, we do believe that this was the correct course of action to take as it allowed as many people as possible to gain the benefits of the new system.

Significant investments have been made in server technology and in strengthening our team and we are working flat out to make this new platform available to everyone.

Rather than risk problems or outages we have just had to take our time on this. Conversion to our new platform has taken much longer than we anticipated and for this we offer you our sincere apologies. We cannot wait to convert all projects to SC4 and we are so grateful to you for your patience as we continue work to achieve this.

PR Award

Earlier this year we launched StatCounter Global Stats – this free service provides market share stats for browsers, operating systems and search engines (including mobile). Within 2 weeks of launch, we were thrilled to achieve over 100,000 hits from over 100 countries.

Instrumental to the launch were the advice and assistance of our PR agent, Simpson FT PR. For this reason, we were delighted to hear that Ronnie Simpson and his team won the 2009 New Media PR Excellence Award for their work on the campaign. Well done all!

Folks,

As different adverts are shown on StatCounter in different parts of the world, here in StatCounter HQ, we don’t actually get to see every single advert shown to our members… and although we try hard to screen all ads BEFORE they are are shown on StatCounter, some nasty ads do slip through the net

In the last 24 hours we have heard reports that some nasty auto-expanding ads have been shown on StatCounter. We do apologise for this. We are investigating this with a view to removing all offending adverts ASAP and thanks are due to StatCounter members Gordon and Tony for their quick action in alerting us to this issue.

While we rely on our advertising revenue to fund our free service, we only want the nicest, best behaved ads on our site. Thanks for your patience as we work to fix this issue.

UPDATE:
We believe we have traced and removed the source of the offending ads. Please post here if you continue to see any nasty ads and give us the following information:

Please also take a screenshot of the ad and we will contact you directly to retrieve the image from you. Many thanks!

Hi folks,

Did you know that you can set up different users in your StatCounter account?

In fact, if you want to allow other people to access your StatCounter account, we strongly recommend that you do this.

Using our User Access Management feature you can also set up different levels of access for each user.

How do I add a user to my StatCounter account?

• Log in to your StatCounter account and click “Users” in the top navigation bar.

• Click “Add New User”.
• Complete the “Account Details” and “Personal Details”.
• In the “User Access Rights” section, assign the chosen user type.
• In the “Project Access” section, select which projects you want your new user to access.

• At the end of the page, click “Add New User” and you’re done!

What are the different User Types?

• Admin (full access to ALL projects)
  This gives the user FULL access to ALL projects in your account - including adding and deleting other users and projects.
• Web Designer
  This gives the user limited access only to projects you allow. Web Designer Users can view stats and configure the tracking and installation code.
• Billing
  This gives the user limited access only to projects you allow. Billing Users can view stats, view and pay invoices and upgrade and downgrade your account.
• Stats Viewer
  This gives the user limited access only to projects you allow. It gives the user the ability to view the stats for each project you allow.
• Restricted Stats Viewer
  This gives the user limited access only to projects you allow. It gives the user the ability to view only the Summary Stats for each project you allow.

How do I change the User Access to a project?
To change the User Access to a project, go to the My Projects page in your StatCounter account. Click the lock icon lock beside your project name. Check the box beside the users you want to have access to this project. Finally, click Update Project Access.

How do I change the settings for a User?
To change the settings for a User, click Users in the top navigation bar. Click the “Pencil and Paper” icon beside the chosen username to edit the User.

WARNING
Please be extremely careful in allowing third parties to have Admin Access to your StatCounter account. Your account may be compromised if you allow a third party to have Admin Access to your account.

With StatCounter you have always had the option to make your StatCounter stats public. This feature allows you to provide visitors to your site with a link to view all your StatCounter stats.

Further to many requests we have now implemented Restricted Public Stats. This option allows you to provide visitors to your site with a link to view only the “Summary Stats” page of your StatCounter stats.

To enable/disable public stats:

• Log in to your StatCounter account.
• Click the ‘lock’ icon beside your project name.

• Click your preferred option
• Public Stats are Disabled
• Only Summary Stats Are Public
• All Stats Are Public
• If you are making your stats public, note the URL to use to send visitors to your StatCounter account e.g.
  http://my.statcounter.com…project_id=xxxxxx&guest=1
• Click ‘Upgrade Project Access’ and that’s it!

Microsoft’s Bing overtook Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the United States and worldwide on Thursday (4th June) according to our StatCounter Global Stats data. Bing grabbed market share from Google.

“It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.”

Our analysis finds that in the US Bing leapfrogged Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%. Yahoo! has 10.22%. Google still commands the US search engine market with 71.47%.

Globally Bing at 5.62% has taken a narrow lead over Yahoo! (5.13%). Google worldwide retains 87.62% of the market.

StatCounter Global Stats, a free online service which captures market share battles of search engines, browsers and operating systems including mobile, was launched in March this year.

The StatCounter Global Stats research data is based on four billion pageloads per month. Other regional and country breakdowns can be viewed at: http://gs.statcounter.com

Full press release available here.

UPDATE 11 June 2009:
While Bing has fallen back to third place behind Google and Yahoo! it is winning market share for Microsoft against its two main rivals in the US and worldwide according to our latest analysis.

We analyzed search engine market share two weeks before and after the formal launch of Bing on May 28th (14th May to the 27th May and the 28th May to 10th June). For the US market it found:
Google decreased from 78.68% to 77.94% (-0.74%)
Yahoo decreased from 11.46% to 10.76% (-0.7%)
Microsoft (Bing, MSN Search and Live Search) increased from 7.4% to 9% (+1.6%)
(See here and here)

“It is too early to say what the long term result will be but this is a creditable performance by Bing,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO StatCounter. “It remains to be seen what happens to Bing after user curiosity and the reported $100m advertising budget runs out.”

Worldwide, comparing the two weeks before and after the Bing launch, StatCounter reports a similar trend with Microsoft taking market share.
Google decreased from 89.81% to 89.69% (-0.12%)
Yahoo decreased from 5.34% to 5.1% (-0.24%)
Microsoft (Bing, MSN Search and Live Search) increased from 3.08% to 3.5% (+0.42%)
(See here and here)

Full press release available here.

Hi folks,

You can now change your “My Projects” page to display Unique Visitors instead of Page Views. To make the change:

• Log in to your StatCounter account
• Click the ‘My Profile’ link in the top navigation bar



• Click the ‘Edit Profile’ button
• For ‘My Projects Display Metric’ choose Unique Visitors



• Enter your password
• Finally click ‘Update My Profile’

We’re delighted to provide you with this new option and many thanks to the various StatCounter members who requested this. Please keep your feedback and ideas coming!