Website Visitor Counter and Where to Get One For Free
A good website visitor counter is a must for any online business. You simply need to know how many people are coming to your site daily and what your conversion rate is. For that you need a free website traffic counter.
So, let’s look at how to add a visitor counter to a website. It is actually pretty easy, here are a few places to check out.
website-hit-counters.com
If you’ve seen those sites with a counter to the side that have numbers on them, those track the number of people who come to your site in a given date, you and your visitors can see the number. You can add a code to your website by simply visiting their site, picking out the style you want and copying and pasting it to your site.
This is a nice little program that will give you the raw number of hits and can help build your reputation with your visitors.
But I think this type of counter is overrated and if you really want to track the success of your online business you should either use Google Analytics or Stats Counter.
Google Analytics
This is also a free website traffic counter that lets the owner see the number of visits their site got throughout the day, only your visitors can’t see it because it is invisible on your site. The way it works is simple you get a code, paste it on every page of your site that you want to track, and then login to Analytics to get the information.
The reason this is so much better than a regular counter is because you get a lot of extra data. For instance you get the average time on your site that visitors see, you get to see where your traffic is coming from, can graph your traffic figures, etc.
I’m not getting into all the details because there is just so many, but this is a much better tool which will help you really understand who your visitors are and how well of a job your site is doing to cater to their needs.
Stats Counter
Stats Counter is another free website counter and works similar to Analytics. While I haven’t used this service personally others have and many consider it to be just as good of a website visitor counter as Analytics.
Traffic Estimators
Now you know the basic ways of putting a website visitor counter
on your website, but what if you want to see your traffic before you put the counter on? Or what if you want to see what your competitor’s traffic is like? While there is no 100% accurate way to do this there are a few free website counters that will estimate the traffic of a specific site.
Traffic Estimate
From what I have seen, this tool will give you the closest estimate of another site’s traffic figures.
Compete
Compete used to be a much better tool because they gave you a lot more data. But nowadays they only shows sites that are receiving a massive amount of traffic. For instance I have a website that is in the top 1% of all sites on the net and compete.com considers it to be too small to list.
Unless you think a site is getting 10,000s or more unique visitors a day don’t bother using this tool.
Alexa
Alexa is a website visitor counter that ranks all sites on the net from most traffic to least traffic. For instance if your
Alexa ranking is 85,523rd then you are the 85,523rd most trafficked site on the net.
While it is a popular tool and most marketers look at it I would take this ranking with a grain of salt. This free website visitor counter only takes into consideration visits from computers that have the Alexa toolbar installed on them.
In other words, it is skewed towards tech heavy sites. A site that has a lot of techi-readers but only receives 100 unique visitors a day could outrank a site about toddlers that has 1000 unique a day on Alexa.
Basically if you want to get a good website visitor counter use either Analytics or stats counter. If you use a traffic estimator remember that they are only estimates.
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