Visitor statistics by email

On this blog I'm testing free visitor tracking services from StatCounter and SiteMeter. For the purpose of this review I'm assuming users don't have hosting where they can install one of the free tracking software packages which require PHP/MySQL support. Further down the page, you'll find a table which compares StatCounter, SiteMeter and OneStat. I haven't tried it on this blog, but there's a screenshot of OneStat's email report here: http://www.mywebsite.force9.co.uk
Click on the "example" link when you get there.
I was a bit disappointed to see that the "Top 10 Referrer Domains" were mostly search engines. I think the reports would be better if OneStat put search engines in a separate list.

After lots of Google searching for more free visitor tracking services with email reports I came up with Google Analytics and HitsLog. Google Analytics is targeted at webmasters who want to monitor advertising and marketing campaigns. The options for email reports are impressive, and I've described them in a separate section below the StatCounter and SiteMeter examples.

Problems with HitsLog.

If you place a text link to HitsLog.com on your site you can sign up for visitor statistics by email. I added a text link and signed up, but the service didn't record any visitors. Meanwhile, during the same period, StatCounter reported a large number of visitors. I confirmed that the HitsLog script was installed correctly by viewing the page source, so the problem must have been at the HitsLog end. Unfortunately, there's no support forum or FAQ section on the HitsLog site, just an encrypted email address. That seems strange, because if the developer(s) have enough technical know-how to write a stats script, why can't they install a contact form or a forum? As the domain name was registered by someone in Russia I decided not to pursue the matter.

Comparison table	OneStatFree	StatCounter	SiteMeter
Email report frequency	weekly or monthly	weekly or monthly	daily or weekly
Ignore IP addresses	-	unlimited - up to 3 wildcards	single IP - single wildcard
Icon/counter options	96×15	10 options, one invisible.	10 options, 20×20 min.
Technical support	FAQs	Forum	FAQs
	Email contents
Pageviews per day	√	√	√
Bar charts	√	x	x
Most visited pages	√	x	x
Top 10 referrer domains	√	x	x
Top countries	√	x	x
Browsers	√	x	x
Unique visitors	x	√	x
First time visitors	x	√	x
Returning visitors	x	√	x
Visits per day	x	x	√
Avg. visits per day	x	x	√
Avg. visit length	x	x	√
Avg. pageviews per day	x	√	√
Avg. pageviews per visit	x	x	√
Visits per hour	x	x	√
Pageviews per hour	x	x	√

Examples:

• The SiteMeter e-mail report also contains plain text tables showing visits and pageviews for each hour in the past 7 days, The format is the same for daily or weekly reports.

• If you choose to receive the StatCounter report on a monthly basis, it will contain one table showing averages and another showing the figures for each day in the month.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free website tracking service for monitoring advertising and marketing campaigns. The code doesn't include a <noscript> image, so if visitors have JavaScript turned OFF, their visits won't be recorded. At the time of writing, GA had 34 report types, including 2 reports tailored for 'AdWords' campaigns. You can choose to have any of the reports sent to you by email in any of the following formats: PDF, XML, CSV or TSV (identical to XLS). Here is a good place to start if you want to know more about setting up Google Analytics email reports.

Conclusion

Total pageviews are not particularly helpful if your traffic doesn't fluctuate much from week to week. It would be more useful to see the keywords visitors are typing into search engines to find the pages. A list of new links from other sites would be useful too.