Now that you have a growing number of pages on your Web site, imagine getting an easy-to-read barchart of your visitors for each hour over the past five days. And how about a statistical breakdown of the number of unique visitors (as opposed to a page reload)? And what about their average number of accesses, where they've come from, monthly running totals and the count since day one?
And imagine this: none of it costs a penny. . .
A growing number of free services have sprung up which provide statistics on your Web pages, in return for the advertising revenue your traffic will generate. One such operation is SuperStats (www.superstats.com). It began operating last September after Jeremy Young from Seattle approached Digital Concrete, LLC with the idea.
Digital Concrete, a holding company based in Provo, Utah, then wrote the SuperStats engine. They already have a range of impressive Web sites and services behind them, including ScriptSearch (at www.scriptsearch.com) - probably the largest CGI and scripts resource on the Web.
Among its useful breakdowns, SuperStats gives each visitor's domain name - the machine on the Net from which they are coming. This is not quite a "geographical" spread (other firms give a more friendly breakdown by country name etc), but a quick glance will show how many visitors came from a particular service provider in Britain or Tokyo or wherever. It will also give a running total of what browsers your visitors are using. This is important if you are trying to attract a large number of people who happen to be using older browsers - all that fancy design work for the latest browsers and plug-ins will go to waste because most of your visitors won't be able to see it!
How does the SuperStats service work? The first step takes just a few seconds - you have to register your page, and you are given a few lines of appropriate HTML to copy and paste into the page (the technical crew at SuperStats have designed this step to be fairly straightforward because, as they agree, quite a few of their users aren't "HTMLsavvy"). Then the next time a visitor downloads the page, their browser sends a request for the SuperStats logo from its Web server in Seattle. The server automatically detects and logs the key information such as the visitor's IP address, their browser type etc. When you log on, most the statistics are in colourful, easy-toread bar charts. The only real drawback for users in Ireland is that it's in Pacific Standard Time rather than GMT.
"We set out to be the best statistical tracking company, period," says Josh James, one of Digital Concrete's two main shareholders. "We have had our obstacles along the way, but one thing we wanted to accomplish in our initial launch is to have the most visually appealing tracking system. We are constantly upgrading our system to keep up with demand and are looking at a major relaunch in about a month or so."
They say their subscriber numbers are "way beyond" initial projections. On an average page they track, it has roughly 15 page-views a day, which gives some idea of the scale of traffic - and the scale of operations of the users. They did experiment with using cookies, but "anonymous users are not too excited about cookies being written to their computers", James says.
Getting technical for a moment, the hardware set-up includes a dedicated Unix box with multiple fibre-optic cables for decent bandwidth.
SuperStats operates within a relatively new but rapidly growing market. "Our competitors are changing quite frequently," James says. "There are a few companies that provide a good service, and we are just trying to stay one step ahead of them. The driving force behind our strategies and upgrades to our system is our users."