Free Web Counters and Statistics
If there's one tool you should add to your site, it's a counter. After all, if you don't know how many people are visiting your site, you don't know if anybody's visiting your site!
Some web hosts provide free a counter for you to put on your home page, or a separate web page where you get the basic info about how many visitors came to your site. You may be satisfied with a simple counter which tells you how many times your home page was viewed. This is good enough for many sites as you start to develop and build your web site and public profile. But, my advice is to switch to a more sophisticated tracking service once your business takes off. In particular, you will need to know the URLs that visitors followed to come to your site, and also what paths among the pages at your site.
If you're running your site as a business, there are several reasons why you need a tracking service for reliable statistics about visitors to your site. First of all, you may need to be able to tell advertisers exactly how many visitors you have each month. The best tracking service will count both the number of times your home page was viewed and how many 'unique visitors' you had. It's one thing to know that your site was viewed 100 times today - but you don't know if 25 people viewed 4 pages during the day, or if 100 people looked at the first page and fled!!
Extreme Tracking- provides comprehensive statistics, but the free version is limited to one tracker per page per site. You can add a tracker to each of your pages, but you do not have ready access to global statistics for your site. The traffic statistics to your site are accessible by the public. You can choose between a free tracking service that your site's visitors can also view, or a paid service with private statistics for $4.50/month. The paid service provides excellent statistical overage of the site as a whole, allowing you to track the most popular paths through your pages, entry & exit pages. You also can view a world map to see where the most recent 300 visitors to your site were located.
Stats4all.com - offers quite a range range of statistics to analyze visits to your site. It tracks visits across all the pages at your site and only requires a small link button. The cost is 10 Euros per month for up to 50,000 page views.
XaraOnline - provides a choice of either counter or tracking statistics services, for free.
If all you want is a counter on your home page, then consider:
Bravenet - offers different styles of counters and quite a variety of statistics that can be gathered about visitors to your site. This service is excellent if you're primarily interested in statistics about visitors coming to your home page.
Sparklit.com - offers great counters if all you need is a public display on your home page. Sparklit has over 100 different styles of counter to choose from.
