Founded in 2000 and one of the first website analytics tools available, Statcounter has grown from its humble beginnings as a website hit counter to a fully fledged analytics tool. Here we’ll explore some of the features and benefits of Statcounter and evaluate if it’s a good alternative to Google Analytics for small businesses and freelancers.
Signing up for the Statcounter 30 day trial of all features is a simple 3-step process. No credit card or billing details are required.
The initial create account screen asks for your Name, Email and you can choose your own Username and Password.
A project in Statcounter is typically used for a single website and you can create unlimited projects for free. In addition to adding your website URL and Title, you can check that Statcounter has auto-detected the correct country and timezone for you and choose your email report frequency, both of which you can change later.
Statcounter will detect if your website is using a website platform such as Wordpress or Shopify and display the relevant instructions for inserting the tracking code. Once you have installed the code above the closing <body> tag in your footer HTML, you can use the Verify Installation button on this page to check it’s installed correctly.
Confirmation that your code is installed will then appear on your Projects page. This is also the home screen you’ll see when you next log in to Statcounter. If you have multiple projects or websites, each will be listed here with some Page View / Session totals and a mini trend chart, giving you an overview of how multiple websites are doing at a glance.
Clicking the project title or the View Stats button will bring you to all the stats, reports and tools available for that project.
Statcounter offers a comprehensive range of useful aggregate metrics along with a collection of invaluable tools for gaining deeper insights into the behavior of your visitors. Among these tools are a real-time live feed of each visit with detailed information about engagement, location, device, navigation paths and more for each visitor and Session Replay recordings which let you play back each visit like a video, showing you exactly how your visitors experienced your site on their device.
See how visitors are really experiencing your website
Summary Stats offers a high-level overview of how your website traffic is changing over time. This is useful for spotting positive traffic trends to gauge the results of your marketing or advertising campaigns or negative trends that might warrant further investigation using some of the other tools available in Statcounter.
The Pages section in Statcounter gives you insights into how your all-important entry pages (also known as landing pages) are performing. The initial screen lists your landing pages, sorted by number of sessions and shows you the average bounce rate and conversion rate for each. The conversion rate is based on the conversion goal you set, for example the percentage of visitors who made it to your order confirmation page.
Deeper analysis of each landing page is available by clicking Page Analysis. Here you will see trend charts for Sessions, Conversion Rate and Traffic Sources including search engines, referrals from other websites, social media and paid traffic campaigns. These charts show you how a landing page is performing over time.
If you’re creating dedicated landing pages on your website for PPC campaigns, SEO or social media campaigns, the Pages section in Statcounter will show you which pages are doing well, which may need further investigation with Session Replay and how your optimization efforts to your landing pages impact their performance over time.
What sets Statcounter apart from Google Analytics and most analytics tools is the depth of insights available for each individual visitor. Without collecting any information that could be used to identify an individual person, Statcounter shows you what each visitor did during their visit, how they experienced your website and the struggles that may have prevented them from following through with a purchase, signing up for your newsletter or completing your contact form, to name a few examples.
Visitor Activity in Statcounter is a real-time live feed of your visitors that has a number of powerful tools for helping you to understand your visitors.
Metrics on this page for each visitor such as Session Length, number of Page Views and total number of sessions can help you differentiate between your more engaged visitors and those that bounce or don’t really explore your site. This is especially useful if you’re invested in SEO or paying for traffic via Google or Facebook Ads. Being able to identify the characteristics of your more engaged visitors can help you refine your digital marketing strategy and increase your organic and paid traffic conversion rates.
Location-related information including City, Country, IP Address and Host are useful for seeing where each visitor is from and if you’re running paid ad campaigns, seeing multiple ad clicks from the same IP address can be a sign of click fraud.
System information like device, operating system, browser and screen resolution can help you investigate any website issues that visitors with a particular device configuration may be having.
Referral information such as referring website URL and whether the session was started from a paid traffic source show you exactly how each visitor found your website.
A handy Live Update control which you can toggle On or Off means you can choose to let the page update itself as visitors begin new sessions on your website.
Also available on the Visitor Activity page is one of the most effective tools for gaining insights into your visitor’s behavior. Session Replay enables you to play back a visual recording, like a video, of each visitor session, showing you exactly what your visitors saw and did in their browser as they navigated your website.
Also available on the Visitor Activity page is one of the most effective tools for gaining insights into your visitor’s behavior. Session Replay enables you to play back a visual recording, like a video, of each visitor session, showing you exactly what your visitors saw and did in their browser as they navigated your website.
Seeing your website through the eyes of your visitors shows you what works, what breaks, where things can be improved and the friction points and frustrations that may be turning your visitors away, resulting in losing valuable conversions and sales.
Filters in Statcounter offer an easy way to zone in on particular cohorts of your website visitors and the ability to combine multiple filters lets you be very specific.
If you’re selling a product or service online, a tried and tested method for getting insights into your target audience is to look for commonalities among the visitors who really engaged with your website. Using a combination of filters in Statcounter, it’s easy to create a shortlist of engaged visitors, for example:
Recognising patterns among these engaged visitors such as where they are from, how they found your site, which content they were most interested in and more, helps you to focus your future marketing efforts in the right direction.
Another powerful way to use Statcounter’s filters is to examine your less engaged visitors. For example, if you’re paying for ads to drive traffic to your site and those visitors are bouncing or not showing much interest, it’s a sign that you may need to tweak your ad copy and your landing page to improve conversions.
People interested in your product or service often make multiple visits to your website before purchasing. Statcounter’s Magnify Visitor feature shows you the history of visits for an individual visitor. Here you can view detailed information about the various locations, devices and navigation paths for each of their visits and play back recordings of each session.
The ability to add labels to individual visitors is useful for keeping track of particular visitors such as returning customers, potential prospects, spammers or click fraudsters. You can also set an alert for any visitor you have labeled and get notified when they next return to your website.
The Reports dashboard in Statcounter is a collection of aggregate metrics that gives you a high level overview of your website visitors and can help answer questions such as what location do most of my visitors come from? Which percentage of my visitors come from organic search, paid traffic and referring websites? Do most of my visitors use a mobile or desktop device to browse my site?
Statcounter provides an integration with Google Search Console so you can see how people are finding your site in Google Search and which keywords are most popular.
Statcounter offers a choice of daily, weekly or monthly email reports. In addition to the default summary traffic metrics, you can customize your email reports to include a broad selection of other metrics such as most popular pages, top entry pages, top referrers, locations and many more.
Once you’ve completed the 30 day trial Statcounter, you can choose a plan that best suits your needs. One of the benefits of a 30 day trial is that you will get a good idea of your current web traffic volume over the course of a month and how many pageviews you may need in your plan.
Statcounter’s Basic plan is free and lets you analyze your most recent 500 pageviews. Some of the features from the Premium Plan are available in the Basic plan, including Summary Stats, Visitor Activity and the Reports Dashboard. Session Replay is also available on the Basic Plan as an add-on, starting at $9 per month.
The Premium plan starts at $9 per month. This covers your most recent 100,000 pageviews and all of the Premium Plan features. You can increase the number of recent pageviews you’d like Statcounter to store at any stage.
Session Replay is available as an add-on, starting at $9 per month for 1,000 monthly recordings.
You can set up unlimited projects in Statcounter and choose between Basic or Premium for each of your projects. There is no limit to the number of users you can add.
Paying yearly gives you a discount that is equivalent to 2 months for free.
Statcounter incorporates a comprehensive array of powerful real-time web analytics tools in an intuitive and easy to use interface. This makes it especially well suited to small business owners and freelancers who wear many hats and can dedicate only a portion of their time to the multitude of tasks at hand.
The aggregate metrics in Statcounter provide a useful overview of website visitors and traffic trends over time, while observing the behavior of individual visitors takes the guesswork out of optimizing your website to improve the user experience and increase conversions.
Since its inception in 2000, Statcounter has remained an independent, self-funded business and unlike Google, does not profit from the data of its customers.
Statcounter’s ease of use, range of features, independence and value for money make it a great alternative to Google Analytics for small business owners and freelancers.
