Terminology Poll: Sessions, Visits & Visitors

Our lifetime summary stats allow you to keep track of the number of Page Views, Unique Visits and Returning Visits since you added your project to StatCounter. These stats are independent of your normal log size, have no storage limit and are recorded on a daily basis, allowing you to see weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly totals.

If a visitor to your website has 5 page views in the morning, and returns to your website later that day for another 3 pageviews, we record this as 2 Unique Visits for that day. On another day, if you have 2 different people viewing your site in the morning, this would also be recorded as 2 Unique Visits.

Recently we’ve been working on adding a new stat to record distinct visitors to your site, so that in the above example, you’d see 1 visitor for the first day and 2 visitors for the second day.  The terminology between ‘Visits’ and ‘Visitors’ could be confusing though, so we are proposing to rename ‘Unique Visits’ to ‘Sessions’ in advance of adding the new stat. Let us know what you think in the poll below!

Current: Unique Visits (New Visitors stat will be in pink)

blog-unique-visits

 

Proposed: Rename Unique Visits to Sessions

blog-sessions

Note: Returning Visits hasn’t been shown in these screenshots, but it would likely be renamed to Returning Sessions.

 

We’d really love your feedback about what terminology you like the best and find easiest to understand. Please post your preferences in the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Pick your terminology!

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Continue reading “Terminology Poll: Sessions, Visits & Visitors”

10x Better Upgrades

We are always working to improve the StatCounter service we offer to our members. Thanks to the fantastic work done by our engineers over the last year we are thrilled to be able to make the following announcement.

All our upgrade plans have been multiplied by a factor of 10 at no extra cost.

Here is how the plans have changed.

  • 5,000 increased to 50,000
  • 10,000 increased to 100,000
  • 25,000 increased to 250,000
  • 50,000 increased to 500,000
  • 100,000 increased to 1,000,000
  • 200,000 increased to 2,000,000
  • 500,000 increased to 5,000,000
  • 1,000,000 increased to 10,000,000

These log size increases are available now to all new and existing upgraded customers. To assign the additional log space to your project simply log in to your StatCounter account. Click “Adjust Log” and assign the new log space.

We have also introduced two brand new plans.

  • 50,000,000 log quota priced at $249 a month.
  • 100,000,000 log quota priced at $399 a month.

If you don’t already have a StatCounter upgrade there has never been a better time to get it. Upgrades start from just $5 a month. In addition to log size increases you also get:

  • StatCounter API Access
  • Ad free experience for the website and mobile apps
  • Advanced Email Report Options
  • Long term keyword archival from Google Search Console

We hope you enjoy the new massive log sizes!

Custom Tags

Custom Tags is a new way to measure traffic with StatCounter.

It lets you tag pageviews on your website with whatever data you wish, allowing you to filter and segment your traffic in StatCounter reports in completely customised ways. This can lead to measurement and insights not previously possible with StatCounter.

For example, if you manage a blog, here’s some examples of questions you can now answer using Custom Tags:

  • Which authors generate the most traffic?
  • Which blog topics attract the most traffic?
  • Which types of headline attract the most readers?
  • Are long blogs more popular than blogs with lots of images and less text?

Answering these questions could help you optimise your content to attract more traffic.

An ecommerce website might want to know:

  • Which categories of product attract most attention?
  • What was the navigation flow of a user with a specific username or account ID?

(See Custom Tags Use Cases in the Knowledgebase for suggestions on how to use Custom Tags to answer these questions)

A pageview can be tagged with any data using one line of JavaScript code on your page.

For example in blog posts that feature a lot of images you could tag them like this:


_statcounter.push({“tags”: {“blog_format”: “image-heavy”}});


Or in blog posts with less images and more text you could use the following tag:


_statcounter.push({“tags”: {“blog_format”: “text-heavy”}});


(See How do I use Custom Tags in the Knowledgebase for important implementation details)

Once this data is recorded you can see how your tag values compare in the Custom Tags report:

custom_tags_blog_format_2

With the example code above you would be able to see which type of blog format attracts more traffic, and use that insight to help optimise blog posts in the future. You can also click on a tag value in this report to to see which of your urls perform best for that tag.

You can also filter many of our existing reports for these tag values.

Remember, the above are just sample ideas – you can tag your pageviews with any data that is useful to you.

We will be developing this feature further and adding new features to help you measure more with StatCounter. We’d love to hear your feedback on what you want to measure and how we can help make this happen with StatCounter.

Have fun and let us know what you think!

See Also:

How do I use Custom Tags?
Custom Tags Use Cases

How to use filters to view stats by location

Filters is a powerful tool that we launched 2 years ago. It allows you to filter any of the StatCounter stats to answer many different questions about your visitors.

A common request we get into support, is how to filter the stats by location i.e. how do I only view view visitors from the US? Rory from the StatCounter team made this video to show how easy it is to do. Please set the video to full screen and highest video quality for best viewing!

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