Downside to remotely hosted counters/tracking?

[slobizman]

Is there any downside to using the remotely hosted counters.traffic tracking and analisys tools?

[claus]

One downside is that these will normally not be able to monitor the spidering of your pages, as the spider visits will not be recorded by such tools. For this, you need to examine log files.

Otoh, that's also a plus, as sometimes you are more interested in "real traffic" than spiders.

Real visitors coming from Search Engines, and even their search terms is available in all the serious tools on the market - just not the automated queries/bots/spiders.

/claus

[Mohamed_E]

One problem with the free tool I use is that I suspect that, when the web is humming, it may sometimes drop referrals. That is a hunch, from observing how slow the reporting tool sometimes is.

But I must say that, for the unsophisticated tracking that I need, it works well. However, it does not allow me to follow a given user throughout a visit, page by page. Many ecommerce situations need that kind of data, I do not.

[slobizman]

What I'm really look for, specifically, in addition to the basic number of visitors, is the Top XX referring domains. I'd like to end up with the top 50 or so domain names, not including search engines. (I want to place these on a list on my home page).

[biggles]

slobizman

Just sent you a sticky with the URL of a PDF put out by 1 vendor that covers the pros & cons.

Hope it helps