Statcounter Review
Detailed Reviews
With over 2.5 million webmasters benefitting from StatCounter, it is easily one of the best web analytics tools of today. The tool comes packed with a wide range of features that help you monitor, track, and analyse the visitors and their habits. This in turn helps the webmasters make more effective strategies for a better online presence.
StatCounter is a freemium tool. While the free StatCounter account is pretty decent for the beginners, the premium version has been designed to provide in-depth stats that suit the needs of more advanced web developers, bloggers, and ecommerce entrepreneurs.
The free account offers all the analytics features and you can view them without limits in the Summary Stats. But, the detailed analysis for free users is limited to up to 500 recent visitors. This has been discussed in detail in the Pricing section below.
Growth Plan
You could upgrade to the Growth Plan for more meaningful analysis of the web traffic. The principle focus of this plan is to make the data collected from the web traffic more useful by adding more practical value to it. The detailed insight into your visitors and web traffic can be utilized for devising robust strategies aimed at increasing the revenue. Growth Plan is an additional tool available for $29.99 per month.
Besides encapsulating everything that the StatCounter account offers, the Growth Plan also provides actionable insights into the web traffic to help you improve your ranking. It lays out the recommended tasks that webmasters can follow to systematically enhance the performance of their website leading to increased traffic and revenue.
The detailed analysis and task recommendations are indeed very practical and result oriented. It will not be an exaggeration to say that the developers of StatCounter have done extensive research on what really works at the ground level and have a clear understanding of the nature of the web.
We found industry based ranking as a very useful statistic offered by the Growth Plan. In order to stay competitive, it is extremely important to know how your website lays out on the web landscape against the competition. The parallels are drawn on a variety of aspects including web traffic, mobile traffic, social media ranking, and user experience.
The information is presented to you in a very organized manner and helps you clearly understand where your site stands in comparison to the others. This helps you determine if you need to analyze with a newer perspective and whether or not you must modify your strategies to make them more viable to growth.
The webmasters and online entrepreneurs realize that learning is an ongoing process in the world of web and you could never gather enough knowledge. Thankfully, the Growth Plan is packed with plenty of training materials. There are ‘Custom Learning Tracks’ through videos and articles available in their library. There are various tutorials to help you understand how to better use the StatCounter tool as well. So, if you are stuck with the tool somewhere, besides the Customer Support, you could make good use of the Self-Help materials.
How does it really help?
Understanding your visitors and their online habits is crucial for online success. That’s precisely what StatCounter is about: helping you catch the pulse of the visitors. It offers real time tracking of the customer activities and gives you deep insight into their behaviours.
Whether you are using the free or premium service, StatCounter provides information on a variety of parameters. Since data collection and streaming happens in the real time, you can get a snapshot of the visitor metrics instantly. The traffic filters allow you to view the traffic information based on the device platform, screen resolution, OS, browser and ISP.
Easy to Understand and Easy to Use
The numbers are just numbers if they are not presented in the right manner. Any web analytics tool should be able to present the collected data in a way that is useful and actionable. It is surprising how StatCounter has outstripped Google Analytics in terms of the page views. Large part of its success is attributed to its simplicity.
Not all the webmasters are trained in math to understand the numbers. In fact, many internet entrepreneurs are not even science-educated. This is why the stats must be meaningful and should be able to speak for themselves. StatCounter captures and projects the information in the real time that is easy to understand and use. StatCounter makes sure that you do not require a degree in mathematics to know how your visitors interact with your website.
The tool boasts of an intuitive and systematically organized interface that offers incredible ease of use. The various elements, links and menus are laid out cleanly on the clutter-free interface to ensure easy navigation to every bit of information you are looking for.
It is not difficult for a web analytics tool to get highly complicated. But, the developers of StatCounter have done an exceptional job in keeping it as simple as any such tool could be.
Pricing
The analytics features are grouped in two categories: Summary Stats and Detailed Stats. This is where it gets a little tricky.
The Summary Stats view is - as the name suggests - meant to provide the summary of the statistics. You could get a snapshot of the various metrics including sessions, visitors, page views, etc. Summary Stats is completely free and provides the summary of all the available information.
Detailed Stats is to get in-depth insight into the statistics. But, this part of the tool is strictly limited. The free account can offer stats for only up to 500 most recent page views. If your site is new and does not get huge traffic, free service has everything that you could possibly need to better the site performance. But, if the number is higher, the free account wouldn’t be as effective. For accurate stats and analysis, you will need the paid account, which bumps the number to maximum hundred million page views per month.
The pricing is incremental and depends entirely upon the web traffic. The first paid slab is for 50, 000 visitors and is priced at $5. This goes all the way up to $399 for 100,000,000 visitors.
Summary
StatCounter is undeniably one of the best web analytics tools of today. All its analytics features are free, but for detailed analysis you need to pay according to the web traffic. It gives you a complete insight into the visitor behaviour and how they interact with your website. StatCounter has even surpassed its more popular counterpart, Google Analytics in terms of page views. This clearly goes on to tell how incredible this tool is. StatCounter is the perfect choice for the webmasters and offers excellent return on investment.