using hitbox!

any problems using hitbox?

[soapystar]

i'm thinking of using the hitbox.com free webstats.Anybody think of a reason not to?

[richlowe]

Used them for a couple of years. Their statistics are good, but I found they increased my page load time quite a bit so removed them.

Richard Lowe

[Brad]

They have started experimenting with serving popups.

[podawg]

I've been using them for about 5 months with no problems.
There are no popups in my category, but from what I hear that may change.
If it does, I will be changing to another company.
Also, I haven't see a real increase in page load time from them.
Compared to the last company I used they are really fast.

[bill]

When I demo'd their service they admitted to me that they will only track SE referrals that go to your designated home page...which seemed pretty useless to me. Try SuperStats instead.

[taxpod]

I suggest you get yourself a good stats program. You can't rely on Hitbox. They do track SE referrals to all your pages so that's not an issue. But I don't trust the stats. My logs show 5K uniques and 25K pages while hitbox shows 4K and 18K. I'm using Analog for my logs and I trust it. So why isn't hitbox showing the same numbers? The servers get busy at peak times and don't serve up a graphic so the hits don't get logged. I just wish I could get myself to remove the code from my pages! But those very timely stats are addictive (more than useful)!

[kawikadave]

I've used free hitbox on a few different sites for the past few years. My observations:

- I put any tracking code that pulls from an external site at the bottom of the page, usually right before the closing </body></html>. That way my page should display before it looks at the stats code. I might lose some visitor info if the page doesn't completly load before the user clicks on a link, but it beats making people wait.

- My experience with search engine referral info is different than bill's. I also get stats on keywords for all of my tagged pages.

- I too see differences between hitbox stats and logfile generated stats. Web stats are an inexact science no matter what stats program you use. I think the key is just comparing the same numbers using the same program over time. Apples to apples comparison is what matters.

- I'm also tempted to pull hitbox and just use awstats, but I just like hitboxes real-time, pretty detailed info. And I'm too cheap to pay money for something better.

dave