Statcounter.com vs Google Analytics

I typically use statcounter.com for my normal website. But since vBSEO seems to play nicely with Google Analytics I had decided to give that a try.

So far it seems to be lame and I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or missing a button. With statcounter it will show recent visitor activity starting with where and what terms they came from, the ip address, and show their entire trail so I can study their exact path.

I can't find this functionality in Google Analytics? Am I missing something?

Can I use both at the same time? Would I just need to manually insert my stat counter code into the forum templates?

What's your recommendations?

Then this "Live stats" seems to look need also but I don't think it's released yet. Gravity insights hasn't seemed to be what I thought it was either. Still looking for the point of it really although their support crew was nice : )

Using analytics is a bit more complex than most 'free counter' systems. you should spend some time in the help areas as there's a ton of great information in there.

Analytics is the industry standard. If you ever are to sell/etc your site, they will want analytics data, not 'satcounter' figures. You can run more than 1, but everyhting you add adds wait/load time. You can put it in the footer template.

Live Stats (available, just doesn't work with vb 4.1+ on the current release) is a plugin FOR analytics which lets you see THAT page you are viewing in your forum's real-time stats (well, as real-time as analytics has data for, which isn't real-time).

And that's where Gravity comes in--- it IS real time. If you're trending a topic, or hit the front page on digg, gravity will be the better tool to track whats going on.

But for the daily, or weekly, or yearly results, analytics is the accepted measurement standard.

Ok, well Analytics is seems to be the industry accepted measuring tool so I see the value in leaving it installed but it's not helping me with my need.

I really want to be able to see the exact number of entries made, time of visit, os, browser, exact click trail, if they emailed one of my clients through their links, etc. So, hopefully google has some kind of way to do that and I'm missing it. I guess I'll check on their forums or something. Have you actually used statcounter to see what I'm talking about? For some reason I find it hard to believe that it's less complex then google. It actually seems exactly the opposite... Google just seems a step ahead because of all their adsense integration (which is cool) but we don't offer any of those things on our site to care...

Gravity hasn't shown my thread that I started an hour ago and still has you logged into the forum from whenever you worked on my support ticket. It's been like this every day and hasn't been "live" or "accurate". I'll have to get on their forums and see if I'm doing something wrong somehow...

Google tracks all of those except for entires made. You will need to make goals for those, and frankly, they don't work due to ajax (quick reply box, specifically) as it never gets invoked that way.


I've never used it because i don't have a need for it. analytics tracks everything I need to look at. Frankly, I spend maybe 5 minuets a month looking at stats. I just make sure there's no crazy dips and check for crazy spikes. Otherwise, my site runs itself 99.99% of the time.

I can see that for a forum but not for our new site as I utilize those stats to figure what works... and what doesn't. What exactly visitors are doing. It really helps from a design point of view and to understand what we have built.

I can tell you that I'm shocked at learning what my facebook visitors do when a profile gets shared and we get a burst of a couple hundred visitors. When we designed the site we expected them to do one thing, instead we follow their exact trails and see they do something completely different. It tells us quite a bit. We have learned additional ways to market ourselves based on this and have additional features coming to coral their paths into what we want them doing.

Also each ip's return visit history and trends. Etc.

Forums seem less requiring of this but a website like ours is built based off these stats...

As an aside, what they are doing, including the IP as a user-identifiable metric, has been deemed illegal in some countries, including the likes of Germany and a few others that are ahead of the game on net neutrality.
Germany rules IP address tracking breaches data protection law | Napier - B2B PR and Marketing

So, i'd expect that functionality to change in the near future, or that service is going to be in some trouble.

Don't really know what all that means. The only thing I care about the IP address for is so that it know's returning visits and rough location. Logging IP addresses seems an important feature in forums, voting systems, etc.

I don't think google sucks or that statcounter is god... I would just like this type of functionality included in google for those of us who want it. Statcounter is a pretty popular product and the founder won business weeks young entrepreneur of the year award for it so it couldn't hurt google to include such things to build a better dynamite product for all uses