I’ve used Stat Counter on about 40 sites for years now, a very long time. I’m gearing up to sell a few of them and I find that relying on Stat Counter for an accurate estimation of your stats is a bad idea. I was certain that Stat Counter wasn’t counting all my hits so I googled that exactly and found your site.

The representative from StatCounter commented that “StatCounter tracks real visits… not robots etc. which results in higher results for Awstats” If you are looking at Awstats, on a site like mine, I get thousands of visits from Google Robots every other day! But in Unique Hits it will only be counted once this entire month, so how is that not accurate more accurate that Stat Counter that allows a user to count the same IP as soon as an hour after the last visit? If that wasn’t enough, in AWSTATS, the pageviews are shown next to Unique and under that is shown something called NOT VIEWED TRAFFIC, which is totally separate from the total of Real views made by real people. Right from the smart people at AWSTATS, * Not viewed traffic includes traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes. what other type of fake traffic is there? Proxies? I know for a fact StatCounter doesn’t filter them out. So where’s the problem and where’s the benefit of adding extra JS that slows your page down over a stat program that is embedded in your system?

After years of using Stat Counter, the answer is NONE.

What we have here is StatCounter protecting their product (yes is a product)by downplaying the importance of Awstats and Raw log files which to the untrained eye seem “dinky” and cheap… but why else would it be there consuming tons of resources if it didn’t have some benefit? Other than Godaddy, What host would provide you with garbage to use that ate up tons of memory? Very few.

Inevitably, it’s cool to see where exactly the latest visitors came from and the latest keywords and paths…. but to be honest, stat counter is so overused they’ve become the slowest site I visit. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t logged out after a minute or two of use. And to say that their stat counting isn’t affected by millions of people going to STATCOUNTER.com every minute is to say that you can drive on sand without slowing down; there’s going to be some adverse effects.

Once upon a time, StatCounter tracked incoming Google Adwords clicks, but even after setting up a campaign with thousands of incoming clicks, Stat Counter ceased to count them. Which is sad because they were the only thing I had to try and keep Google honest, now I’m in the dark.

This month just started so its easier to run a comparison on incoming SE traffic (if i started at the end of the month the data from the beginning would be lost on StatCounter, my log file is only 5000). They say I’ve received 991 Different Search Terms while in my AWSTATs the number is 2200. (this is not very scientific, but the discrepancy shouldn’t be that high almost two thirds uncounted).

The final prognosis is reached with help of comparing total hits from Awstats, Analog Stats, and Stat Counter. On statcounter I received 113000 uniques and in Awstats 195000; the same discrepancies are repeated on a monthly basis. So what’s going on? Did I receive 80,000 visits from robots all with different IP’s? Of course not, like I suspected, Stat Counter counts your stats but with a plus minus 20-30 percent (always minus), so its not accurate at all.

Keep in mind, stat counter is embedded by default on every single one of my pages, so there’s no excuse really, especially with regard to the statement presented by Aodhan before. I’m sorry I know you’re probably a nice guy, but Stat Counter is just totally overused and it shows dude.

I think the problem is people are so inclined to distrust Awstats when they don’t see the traffic results they hoped for. Which is ludicrous in the sense that by default Awstats is in a better position to track more accurately than a (slow as hell) third party website that has a snippet of code on some of your pages. And sure enough Adohan’s response to your blog post was an attempt to do just that, make you trust in his product by reaffirming your worst fears in your server’s stats. I can see how he became the young entrepreneur of the year, its easy to sell stuff based on misunderstanding of your competitor, I guess BusinessWeek doesn’t take into account his inability to buy enough servers to make StatCounter.com run smoothly when they made their pick… I’m serious.

What alternatives are there? I’ve been looking around for a solution that can be installed via SSH and be part of the back end without having to install any extra JS or other type of includes. So far, they all are just glorified Awstats’, nothing too special that warrants hundreds being spent.

With respect to prettiness of stats I found the best site. I’m trying out VisiStat which is actually less money than Stat Counter (if you pay for it like I do), but I get way more than 25,000 impressions a month and would be forced to pay 50 cents per thousand I go over, which would cost me $300-500 monthly. The one cool thing about them is the live page view feature where you see users come to your site and they pop up on the screen in TRUE real time (Ajax rules). But this isn’t an endorsement, I won’t be buying their service after 7 days free.

Hope this helped, don’t feel bad there are more of us out there like you!

Sorry to hear about the trouble you have been having with StatCounter. We work really hard to make StatCounter into the best service possible.

I can assure you StatCounter is an extremely reliable way to track the real number of visitors you are actually getting to your website.

I think I may be able to help solve some of the problems you have been having.

a) StatCounter only tracks the actual visitors to your website, whereas ShortStat will also track the search engine robots to your website. This will inflate the ShortStat count.

b) StatCounter will only track the visitors to the pages you install the code on. Whereas ShortStat will work from the server logs so will record all server activity. Currently you only have the StatCounter code installed on your homepage. This will have severely decreased the StatCounter count i.e. only visits to your homepage are counted and not visits to your entire blog. We highly recommend to our users to install the StatCounter code on all pages of their blogs.

To do this you can use this plugin.

http://blog.lucanos.com/2006/04/17/wordpress-statcounter-plugin/

Or alternatively in your wordpress directory you need to open the file wp-content/themes/default/footer.php (or whatever theme you are using) and add the StatCounter code there.

Then don’t forget to remove your old StatCounter code from your homepage or you’ll have it installed twice there!

c) StatCounter will track page reloads whereas a service like Shortstat which works from server logs won’t record this activity. This is because the page will be cached in the visitor’s browser.

I hope this helps clear up the confusion.

All the best!

Aodhan
StatCounter Team