StatCounter Blog

We’re pleased to announce the launch of StatCounter apps for iOS and Android.* These apps are free to download and use. Get your app now from iTunes or Google Play.

Enter your username and password** in the app and view an array of familiar StatCounter reports.

• Compare your traffic trends for this week versus last week
• Examine recent visitors
• View your most popular pages
• Check where your traffic came from
• Plus much more

We hope you enjoy using the new app. In-app ads can be removed at any point simply by upgrading your StatCounter account. Please send your feedback, feature requests and suggestions via the feedback form within the app or via this form.

* The app has been developed to work with iOS 6.1 and later and Android 2.3 and later. For mobile users without a supported Android or iOS device you can still continue to use the mobile site at m.statcounter.com.

**Log in with the username and password you use for your main StatCounter account.

Have you noticed “Keywords Unavailable” in your StatCounter reports?

Unfortunately, this is due to a decision by Google to withhold this keyword information.

Since 2011 Google has been steadily expanding its policy of withholding keyword data for organic search. This means that website owners and professionals have limited access to the keywords used to find their sites. While we at StatCounter can’t undo what Google has done, we have added a new feature to our service to maximize and streamline access to available keyword data.

We have integrated Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) keyword data into our reporting. This means that you, our members, can have efficient, streamlined access to all available keyword data.

You can read more about it in our press release here.

How to link your StatCounter account with GWT

To integrate your GWT data into your StatCounter account, here is what you need to do:

• Log in to your StatCounter account
• Click the “Wrench Icon” beside your project name.



• Click “Import GWT Data”.



• Finally, follow the steps outlined on the page to link StatCounter with your GWT account.

New Keyword Analysis Options

After you have completed the steps above, the Keyword Analysis Stat will now have 4 new options as outlined below:

1. StatCounter Only

This is the usual Keyword Analysis stat.

2. Google Webmaster

This shows the GWT keyword data only. Note that the stats are presented in the familar StatCounter style.

3. Comparison

This shows the GWT keyword data alongside the StatCounter data. You can look at each keyword and compare direct StatCounter data with indirect data collected from GWT.

4. Merged

The ‘Merged’ option includes the standard StatCounter data but redistributes the Google portion of the ‘Keywords Unavailable’ data according to the spread of keywords in the Google Webmaster Tools dataset.

Email reports will automatically include this merged data.

New Stat: GWT Data

Finally there is an entirely new stat called GWT Data which is based solely on the GWT keyword data. It shows you the clicks, impressions and positions of your keywords.

You can click the drill down link beside each result to see how individual keywords have performed over time. See a sample graph below.

We hope this new addition to your stats is useful. Please share your thoughts, comments, questions and suggestions below.

We’re proud to publicly launch the StatCounter API today. The API is available to all members with a paid upgrade. It gives developers direct access to StatCounter data allowing them to build scripts, custom reports, widgets and apps.

Many thanks to our early adopters, who have performed extensive testing on the API and given valuable suggestions and feedback.

To get started, head on over to the documentation. You will need to set your API password. Then you can start constructing your API calls in your preferred programming language.

We’re keen to improve the API and expand its functionality so please send any bug reports or feature requests for the API to us here http://api.statcounter.com/feedback .

Please note that the StatCounter API is only available to StatCounter members with a paid upgrade. Unfortunately while we make every effort to provide as many features and as much functionality as possible with our free StatCounter accounts, we are not currently in a position to offer the StatCounter API on a free basis.

To all our members, customers, suppliers, colleagues and friends,

We wish you a very happy Christmas and all that is good for 2014. As usual we make charitable donations instead of sending Christmas cards. This year we are supporting the Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation and the Capuchin Day Centre.

With best wishes from Aodhan and all the Team at StatCounter.

Today we launch a new feature on StatCounter – Paid Traffic. If you use paid advertising services such as Google Adwords or Bing Ads to promote your website, this new stat will give you an overview of the traffic you are receiving from your advertising spend.

Paid clicks (i.e. clicks to your site from pay-per-click advertising) are grouped together by IP address. The IP address which has generated the largest number of paid clicks to your site is placed at the top.

Let’s take a closer look at the available information using the above example.

• Icons: On the left hand side you will see icons representing the browser, operating system and country of the visitor. In this case, the paid clicks were from a US visitor using the Safari browser and iOS operating system.
• Paid Clicks and Page Views: In this case there are the same number (108) of paid clicks and page views from the IP Address. This means that each time the visitor clicked an advert for your site, they arrived at your site but then did not explore any further pages. This could be an indication of a poor landing page i.e. the initial page your visitor saw did not attract them to visit any further pages of your site.
• Visit Time: For visitors who have explored further than the initial landing page, this column will show the average visit time over all of their paid visits to your site.

Detailed View

Clicking on the plus icon: gives you a detailed breakdown of each click:

This shows that all 5 clicks came from Google, and all 5 were for the exact same search; ‘lock smith’. Note that 4 of the paid clicks resulted in only 1 page view each. This may indicate that the user visited your site but then decided to ‘bounce’ and immediately leave your site (rather then exploring more pages) and click on some other Google results instead.

From here, you can continue to drill down on the IP Address by clicking on the magnifier icon: where you can get a more detailed view on the exact timestamps of each hit as well as the other pages the visitor navigated to on your site.

Click Fraud

StatCounter is often used to identify instances of Click Fraud. We hope that the new Paid Traffic stat will make click fraud detection even easier for our members. For example, high numbers of paid clicks from a single IP address could indicate click fraud, especially if the visitor only ever visits the initial landing page of your site.

NOTE: Click Fraud occurs when individuals or automated computers click on a PPC ad without having any interest in the product/service advertised. Click Fraud is performed, instead, simply to generate a cost for the advertiser (without any chance of making a sale) and consume the advertiser’s budget.

Conclusion

We hope that this new stat gives our members a quick and easy way to review the return they are getting for their spend on Google Adwords and Bing Ads.

Please let us know your thoughts on this new feature. How are you using this stat? Can we improve it? What other ad networks would you like us to include? Any other questions or comments? Please post below.