Web analytics is a competitive industry with dozens of powerful products in the marketplace designed to track visitors, events, and conversions on websites large and small. While Adobe and Google clearly take the lead in high-functioning analytics software with Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics, respectfully, several alternative analytics tools have come into the spotlight. Mouseflow, Crazy Egg, Clicky, Woopra, and Chartbeat have all garnered the attention of industry leaders as strong competitors to Adobe and Google, many just as powerful for a fraction of the price.
One of these rising stars is StatCounter - a tool developed in 1999 by Dublin, Ireland-based developer Aodhán Cullen (when he was only 16 years old!), originally as a web counter solution during the Dot Com Era. Nearly two decades later the platform has grown to providing data and analytics reporting for more than 3 million websites around the world. Though the 1999 platform was limited to helping small-business clients gauge ROI, StatCounter helps e-commerce retailers understand their visitors and optimize website performance through robust, yet simplified, data (Dull, 2018). Their hallmark is providing users with an uncomplicated view of the most relevant and actionable data.
Different Than Your Usual Analytics Powerhouse
StatCounter simplifies the data visualization of site traffic without requiring expert experience in analytics. The data gathered is broken down into an easy-to-read interface detailing who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, and how much time they are spending on a page among many metrics. The reason StatCounter is so effective is that it was created to make complex website data simple for anyone to understand — meaning it can also be acted upon quickly; the uncomplicated interface puts data in context by supplying information about why the statistics are significant, allowing members to look at each dataset individually (Dull, 2018).
Simplicity… at What Cost?
StatCounter’s features empower businesses to track the most crucial metrics on a websites, while also linking visitors to paid ad campaigns. The platform tracks key metrics’ performance over time by comparing pageviews, sessions, visitors and new visitors for any date range (StatCounter, Features 2018). The user interface offers marketers a quick and easy-to-read overview of positive and negative trends, so we can spend more time on finding solutions than diving through endless reports. The easy-to-read dashboard (Fig. 1, below) provides a quick snapshot of site traffic---and goes on to filter “not viewed traffic,” which is traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes. This is crucial to ensure the data being reviewed and acted upon is the most relevant for assessing marketing campaign needs.
Fig. 1: Simple UX Dashboard of StatCounter (InfographicDesignTeam, 2018)
To compare, Google Analytics goes deeper into data---and potentially provides more accurate metrics in the process. Google Analytics dashboards and reports appear different from StatCounter because they actually use different metrics. Google Analytics stats are closer to unique visits because they measure “sessions;” other stats programs tend to measure raw hits or clicks--- a GA “session” is generated from multiple pageviews from a single person (MonsterInsights, 2018). Total sessions will appear smaller when compared to pageviews and clicks; if a user clicks three times that is still logged as one session with Google Analytics. StatCounter will track this as three clicks which is like counting three unique users instead of one.
Tracking Paid Traffic ROI
StatCounter also tracks paid traffic and helps to detect click fraud. Paid ad traffic can be reviewed holistically in the platform, and can help marketers see where click fraud may be eating up paid media budgets via the Paid Traffic report feature (Fig. 2). Visitors via paid media are grouped by IP address, with the most traffic from a single address at the top of the list. A helpful feature of this report is the Page Clicks and Page Views. In a situation where these metrics are equal from the same IP address (such as the first row in Fig. 2), we learn that each time a visitor clicked an advertisement for a site, they arrived at your site but then did not explore any additional pages (SiteCounter, 2013). This could be indicative of irrelevant content on the landing page, poor UX, or a missing connection between the paid ad content and that on the website. From here, users will bounce and fail to explore additional pages of the website.
Fig. 2: Paid Media Traffic Report (StatCounter, 2013)
In contrast, Google Analytics goes a bit deeper in reporting on paid traffic. While StatCounter focuses on the visitor’s experience on the site, Google Analytics provides detailed breakdowns of the ads that drove users to the site, including ad campaign, content, type of referral, referral path, keyword, and social source referral (Google, Campaigns and traffic sources 2018).
Trouble in Paradise: The Statcounter Security Breach
Less than one week prior to writing this review, StatCounter experienced a serious security breach on its platform. Hackers reportedly inserted malicious code inside the company's main site-tracking script. According to Matthieu Faou, the ESET malware researcher who discovered the hack, this malicious code hijacks any Bitcoin transactions made through the web interface of the Gate.io cryptocurrency exchange (Cimpanu, 2018). The snippet of JavaScript affected is part of the central StatCounter code, which is installed on each website using StatCounter as their metrics tool. There are over 688,000 websites that currently appear to load the company's tracking script; however, the malicious code inserted into StatCounter's site-tracking script only targets the users of one site --cryptocurrency exchange Gate.io (Cimpanu, 2018). Gate.io immediately removed the code from their site and no longer works with SiteCounter for website analytics, according to their press release (gate.io, 2018). In their statement Gate.io says that it encourages users to harden their accounts with two-factor authentication. At the same time, it is uncertain that two-factor authentication would have prevented this attack to their platform.
Cryptocurrency hacks are becoming more common as Bitcoin and Ethereum pick up value. While the hack to StatCounter truly only affected one website, the hack itself raises concerns about the nature of external JavaScript since it can be modified easily. For companies like StatCounter that are installed into a website with a snippet of JavaScript, this raises a very big red flag. The fact that this code is so easily modified presents a larger question as to whether this is the best website monitoring and tagging protocol, particularly in an age when privacy and securing personally identifiable information is central to digital policymaking around the world. If this continues to become a problem and new technology not reliant upon the JavaScript snippet is developed, companies like StatCounter will ultimately go out of business.
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References
Cimpanu, C. (2018, November 08). Hackers breach StatCounter to hijack Bitcoin transactions on Gate.io exchange. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-breach-statcounter-to-hijack-bitcoin-transactions-on-gate-io-exchange/
Dull, A. (2018, October 11). StatCounter Delivers Actionable Insights By Making Website Analytics Easy and the User Experience Intuitive. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://www.cardrates.com/news/statcounter-makes-website-analytics-easy/
Gate.io. (2018, November 07). Gate.io will stop using statcounter for traffic stats [Press release]. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://www.gate.io/article/16665
Google. (2018). Campaigns and traffic sources - Analytics Help. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6205762?hl=en
InfographicDesignTeam. (2018, May 19). 7 Google Analytics Alternatives to Track Site Traffic. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://www.infographicdesignteam.com/blog/7-google-analytics-alternatives-to-track-site-traffic/
MonsterInsights. (2018, February 16). Why Google Analytics Is The Most Accurate Website Statistics Solution. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://www.monsterinsights.com/docs/why-google-analytics-is-the-most-accurate-website-statistics-solution/
StatCounter. (2013, August 21). New Feature: Paid Traffic [Web log post]. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://blog.statcounter.com/2013/08/new-feature-paid-traffic/
Statcounter. (2018). Features. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from https://statcounter.com/features/
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