Gadget User Blog

I’ve been playing around with a number of stats plug-ins at the moment and well, it’s all rather confusing to be honest. I have way too many little scripts running off GUB, but I’m trying to work out what’s best. I am using statcounter and that is proving to vary wildly with the information that I’m getting out of StatTraq.

I’m also looking at wp-slimstats and Google Analytics.

I haven’t really reached any conclusions yet, other than statcounter gives you a very low result and StatTraq gives a higher result. Google sits somewhere in the middle and I haven’t really been using wp-slimstats long enough to tell.

What is plainly apparent is that they all have pros and cons. [more]

If you use one of the packages like StatTraq or wp-slimstats on a very popular site, you end up with a very big database as they both use the MySQL database on the server that hosts your website. If you use Google Analytics or statcounter, then the data is held on their servers, but it doesn’t seem as accurate in terms of visitors (or is that just because they show lower numbers!?).

Having recently installed useronline with the ip2nation functionality, I’ve realised there are more people visiting GUB than I’d thought so I think the locally hosted stat counters are probably a little more accurate.

Mind you, they are reasonably easy to set up, but not that easy to upgrade or maintain as you need to know a little about databases to get by. Fiddling around with a database can be quite a daunting prospect, but once I was confident as to what I was doing I was able to delete and reinstall tables pretty fast and without much worry.

They all have different features, and as you’d expect, Google has the most attractive interface.

All of the stat counters are easy to install. I ran into trouble trying to upgrade StatTraq to a later version beta result – bit of a disaster, and then I accidentally installed slimstats rather than wp-slimstats. But despite all of this I would recommend trying a few to see which you like (or which gets you better numbers). The number of visitors to GUB is, sadly, not going to put my server under any stress for some time to come!

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