Blogging Tools Week: StatCounter and Performancing

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A stat counting tool is vital for any website, let alone a blog. For me, my stats have shown me how my blog has matured and aged over the few months I have been posting on it.

The best stat counter which I would freely recommend to any person out there is the one at www.statcounter.com. They are the world's most popular stat counter and there reports are always spot on. There are a number of things which are important when it comes to viewing details on statcounter.

Pageviews: This tells you how many times your individual webpage has been loaded and has been viewed.
Unique Visitors: This shows how many visitors have come to your site, who have not previously visited before.
Returning Visitors: This shows how many visitors are coming back to your site, having visited it before.

However, as I am currently using a blog hosted by Blogger, I am not able to make full use of the functions on StatCounter. For example, I am unable to see where my visitors have come from. This is especially important, as I can link swap with any sites linking to one of my articles or posts. I can also check to see whether an article has been Dugg or added to del.ici.ous which is another tool which I will cover later on this week.

As a result, I found another Stat tool to compliment StatCounter called Performancing Metrics (www.performancing.com). Along with the normal visitor count and pag views, I am ble to record where my visitors are going to after visiting my page, and where they are arriving from.

Another brilliant tool which Performancing encorporates is an Adsense tracker. This shows you how many clicks you have had on your ads, and at what times of the day they have been clicked. I have often been notified of a click before it appears on Adsense, so this has also boosted my morale at some times!!!

I would thoroughly recommend that you use these 2 sites to track the state of your blog, and to see how it has developed over time. On the left is the first graph I have ever published for Blogtrepreneur that shows the exponential growth of Blogtrepreneur over the opening few months. Due to this growth I plan on expanding Blogtrepreneur!