Statistics: how important are they to you?

  • I’m just curious how important having access to a counter and/or statistics is to you. I have been through several different statistics programs, and finally settled on BBClone:
    https://bbclone.de/
    Check out their demo to see how it works.
    Why? Well, for one thing, it fascinates me to see where people are hitting my sites from. Secondly, once I get my act together, I want to get the word out about my public health site and try to attract users from public health schools around the world. BBClone has a DNS resolving feature built into it that will return to me the domain name of most visitors. (I currently have this turned off, due to a performance drag.)
    There’s a local file that installs with the software that references IP addresses to countries, so it’s fun, to me, to see the country flags.
    I don’t have a visual counter displayed on any of my pages, because my opinion is that they can do two different things: wow people by showing them there are a ton of hits, or prompt them to leave more quickly because of low traffic.
    BBClone doesn’t use a database, which is a little unique.
    Overall, I’m a numbers kind of guy, and I like to look at the data, so it’s 75% self-serving. The other 25% is site-serving. Do you use a counter or statistics program? Which one? Why? How often do you look at the numbers?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Hits and visits are my only reason for existing. ??
    But (more) seriously, folks…. I certainly like knowing how much traffic I’m getting, and from where. Half the fun is being led to the referring sites that I’d been previously unaware from.
    I just installed the industry standard: Sitemeter. The novelty for me is enough satisfaction. I might switch it at some point.

    Thread Starter ccheaton

    (@ccheaton)

    I tried to install AW Stats, but it was a disaster, and still isn’t working. Ugh… I wish I knew more about Linux. The documentation is horrid.

    I could care less. I hardly ever check my sites’ stats unless I’m just feeling curious.

    Statistics: how important are they to you? … Simple, they’re not.

    i dont care abt traffic… more interested in knowing refers. ??

    I’m not as much interested by statistics than by knowing if something I’ve written has a good chance of being read in the future, i.e. googled (mostly concerning code snippets in various language I post on my blog). So I wrote my own version of a “hit counter”, which keeps tracks of the number of page displays, direct hits, direct hits coming from Google, and even the number of times the Googlebot crawled that page ??

    Thread Starter ccheaton

    (@ccheaton)

    The other thing that I use it for:
    I have some family-oriented sites (for my family): a discussion board, genealogy software, etc… It’s all done in an attempt to bring all of my family members together for online discussion. It’s catching on… I watch the stats to see who visits, and then I pelt the other members of my family with harassing emails until they do! ??
    Heh.. not really. I just encourage.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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