I’ve tried out a few website traffic reporting systems, Hubspot, Quantcast, Sitemeter and of course Google.  No matter which site I use the results are similar but different.  And the stats never seem to match my WordPress Blog Stats.  So which one do you use?  Which one provides better information? All but Hubspot can be used for free (with advanced features being subscription based).  Granted Hubspot is way more than a visitor statistics provider and is a very useful system at a reasonable price.

Quantcast – the free statistics break-up the visitors into US and Overseas.  The Quantcast counter on my site is only showing 468 monthly visitors.  This is only the US visitors.  They are reporting and additional 560 global people.  They also give some nice demographic information such as 58% of the visitors to my site are female, 62% are between the ages of 18-49, 31% earn between $60-100k per year, and 44% have finished college.  I’m not sure how they get this information but I’ll take it!  The other area that is interesting is the section labeled, “Audience Also Likes”.  This shows that the people that are visiting my site are likely to visit the following categories of sites: bridal, commerce-food, discount, parenting, fashion/cosmetics.  This gives me some information that is helpful in trying to get advertisers and making sure that any banner ads are targeted correctly for my visitors.

Google Analytics – now I look at my google stats and I see that in the past month I’ve had 710 visits with 1,538 page views.  The information that I get from Google is a little different from Quantcast.  From google I get that 70% of my visitors get to me by search engines, I can see my most popular pages, and my most popular search phrases.  From this information I can see that restaurants are the most popular pages and search terms.  This would either indicate that I’m heavy with restaurant pages or that there are a lot of searches for restaurants so I should concentrate on that area to build more traffic.

Sitemeter – this site gives me the same information that Google does, visitors, page views and referrers.  The reports look ok and the nice this is they give me a little banner I can put on my site so that visitors can see how many visits I’ve had.  This is always a nice little ego booster if your numbers are good.

Conclusion – I like Google and Quantcast and they are both free.  Because they provide some different useful information I would use them both.  This is going to junk up the code of your pages a little but it’s worth it especially if you are trying to get advertising for your site.

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