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What are you doing to track visitors to your blog? Many blog software packages, such as Wordpress, come with basic stat tracking as part of the package. If you want to go beyond that, I have five suggestions for your consideration. There are more options, if none of these seem perfect for you. These are a starting point.
The first option is Feedburner. Feedburner is free and does quite a lot for you. Feedburner tracks the number of blog subscribers, counts visitors and provides individual post stats. It also helps with advertising. Teli Adlam from OptiNiche.com has a free PDF handbook for using Feedburner that will help you learn all about its possibilities. Feedburner is free.
At Have a Mint, they are promoting a system called Mint that helps you identify what parts of your site are most interesting to visitors. They describe the software.
Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard.
There's a one-time fee of $30 for Mint. (This is not to be confused with another software product called Mint that is used for personal finance.) Unless you are hosting your blog on your own domain, Mint may not work for you. If you are using wordpress or blogspot free hosting, you can't use it. You need access to your own server so a database can be added for it. Here's Mint's description of the requirements.
The third option is the free Stat Counter. According to Stat Counter, they provide,
A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!
Many people like the free Stat Counter. Some of them indicated their approval at Stumble Upon, including Kathysue. Kathysue's site is AZhttp, an Arizona Internet marketing firm.
MetriServ Web Analytics charges a monthly fee based on traffic. MetriServ would work on a blogspot or wordpress.com hosted blog. They claim,
For maximum accuracy, we collect web metrics directly from the browser of the visitor and store them on our servers in aggregated form. No communication with your servers is needed. All you have to do is insert a single line of JavaScript code on the pages you want to monitor.
MetriServ company offers a free Windows Vista Gadget and Mac OS X Widget Service that include basic web statistics (today's pageviews and visits). The range of information from their free service is limited, but you get the convenience of having a Gadget or Widget on your desktop.
The fifth and final suggestion is Crazy Egg. At Crazy Egg, they brag about displaying the stats in "stunning visuals," so it may appeal to the visually minded over the mathematically minded. You can get Crazy Egg services free for up to 5000 visits a month (and 4 pages). After that there's a payment scale based on your traffic. Crazy Egg's most interesting feature is what they call a heat map. The heat map shows you which parts of your page got the most visitor action. You can quickly see if your advertising is getting the attention you hoped it would with Crazy Egg.
The anonymous blogger at Web Podge reviewed Crazy Egg and stated that it didn't seem to provide much more information than Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is the elephant in the living room that i have left unmentioned in the list of five options. It's a bonus option to consider. I just couldn't stop at five.
Your stats await.
