Internet April 3rd, 2007 by HMTKSteve
Why I am dumping sitemeter (and you should too)
Recently I encountered some news about Sitemeter selling out to an advertising company that wants to place tracking cookies on all sitemeter member sites. At first I thought this was bogus but then I checked.
Sure enough, after clearing my cookies and looking at my site I found a cookie for "specificclick".
I have also noticed a general slow down in load times for all of the sites I use sitemeter as a tracking tool.
Let it be known, from this day forward I will be dropping sitemeter tracking from all of my websites and I will no longer suggest others use it.
PS: Now that I have removed the sitemeter code I am finding that the site loads much much much faster!
thanks for the heads up!.. I will not be joining thats for sure..
I haven’t noticed any difference in the loading of the page, but I highly recommend switching to StatCounter. I run that and Analytics on all my websites, and they cover everything I’d ever need to know.
I will be checking out statcounter soon.
Good to know. I need a backup to Analytics as well.
I was thinking about adding Sitemeter to my sites. Never mind now…
[...] at Ramblings from the Marginalized told us why he’s dumping Sitemeter and why we should too. I never used them, so no worries [...]
Statcounter rules. Been using it for a few years now on various sites. I think I recently read that they were offered some cookie scam and refused it.
Problem is, if you don’t pay them you can only track the last 100 hits.
I use it in conjecture with Google Analytics (which is a bummer to read if you just want the latest info). Saying that, I think I removed the Google Analytics code a few weeks back and never felt the need to re-instate it.
I use the Google code as well as my server logs. I liked sitemeter because it was constantly updated.
I can get similiar data from mybloglog but…
Yeah, the MBL pro stats are kinda ‘ehh’. They are great for seeing fresh stats, but overall it’s not so good.
What host are you on? I know most hosts with cpanel offer AWStats, which gives up to the second information.
Seems like some people will do anything for a few extra bucks.
Why don’t you try analytics its marvelous
I already use Google Analytics. I used sitemeter because it provided instant information, unlike Analytics.
I use Analytics, but you’re right you can’t get information as fast.
For real-time updates I like the Firestats plugin for wordpress.
Firestats? Hmmm… I think I will have to look into that one.
Hm, I never heard of sitemeter…Is it like analytics?
Hmm.. All the while I was using Awstats and Analytics. Good thing I didn’t use sitemeter though.
Yea.. Awstats is good, but it doesn’t provide you with enough information. Statcounter + Analytics covers pretty much everything.
Ill have a look at statcounter, regarding analytics and other stat tools, I dont think they show you searches users have made on your site, well, not in an easy to interprate way. The advantage of sitemeter was that you could see what people were looking for on your site, which could prompt posts on a topic that was in demand, but you had not already covered.
It is useful to a point, but given the info provided above, I will also be dumping it, a bit of a shame they spoilt their plug in in this way.
MyBlog Log are doing something similar though and you still run their widget (as do I). I wrote a post on that a couple of weeks ago, with a link back to shoemoney where a more comprehensive post may be found (on MyBlog Log).