StatCounter tips

redcrown

Like many here, I use the free "Statcounter" service to track activity on my Smugmug site. Just discovered two useful features.

1. Under the "Tools" option you can disable loging of your own activity via a cookie. Keeps from clogging your limited 100 entries with your own hits. So before you browse your own Smugmug site, go to Statcounter first and get the cookie.

2. "Recent Visitor Activity" is the most useful Statcounter page for me, but by default it lists the Smugmug URLs, with those meaningless numeric gallery IDs. Not much use unless you are good at memorizing 7 digit numbers. At the bottom of the page is a check box to display page titles instead of URLs. Page titles are gallery names, so the log becomes readable.

dogwood

Thanks for the tips. I also use statcounter but didn't know about these features.

ivar

redcrown wrote:

1. Under the "Tools" option you can disable loging of your own activity via a cookie. Keeps from clogging your limited 100 entries with your own hits. So before you browse your own Smugmug site, go to Statcounter first and get the cookie.

You can actually also choose not to track hits from your IP address. (of course you need a static IP address) Which saves you the problem of having to create cookies, especially useful if you are using multiple computers and half a dozen browsers

SteveM

I agree that the Recent Visitor Activity is the most informative page, but don't let those numbered galleries throw you. They're clickable links that should (For me, in Firefox) open in a new window, so you immediately see not only the exact gallery that was being visited, but the exact photo that was being viewed. It's a pretty quick process for me to go down the line of links, skipping the referral URLs and open and close pages to see what they saw. As an event photographer, I often times can tell by which photos were viewed, who exactly was visiting my site, so I know where to better focus my attentions at the next event.