THE RITECOUNTER USER GUIDE

If this is something you're already familiar with and you would rather get explanations of RiteCounter features and how to use them properly, click here Inexperienced users, read on.

When you first register with RiteCounter, you will be given four menu options - Help, Add Site, Personal Settings, and Logout. If you click 'add a site', RiteCounter will ask for the details of your website - name, URL, and a description for example. Fill these values in properly, and click 'next'.

The next screen will ask you to choose what kind of counter you want. All the RiteCounter options can be changed later without any changes to the code, so feel free to experiment. Most users seem to like the invisible counter at the top, so that's a good default option.

Once you've done that, your next screen will give you the RiteCounter code you need to install on your webpage.

Installing the code is really simple. Just highlight the text supplied to you in the third RiteCounter 'add site' page, and copy it to your clipboard (ctrl-c on PC, Apple-C on the Mac).

Open your webpage file in Notepad, go to the bottom of the page just before where it says </body>, and paste the RiteCounter code there.

Save the page, upload it your hosting server space, and you now have RiteCounter installed on your website. Yep, it's that simple.

Ideally, you should do this again to the bottom of every page you want to keep track of. Some people only want to gather stats and hit information from their front page, but to really get good use out of RiteCounter, you need to add that code to every page on your website so you can see how every aspect of the site is performing.

The way RiteCounter works is that, whenever someone goes to your page, a small image file on our server is called upon by that user's web browser. The invisible RiteCounter is a 1 pixel x 1 pixel image that, in reality, nobody will see, but the act of calling upon it sends information from the user (nothing private or personal) to our tracking computers, where we tally things such as what country they're from, what pages they visited, what page they came from, what system they use, what screen resolution they have, what browser they have, what keywords they've searched for, how long they spent on the website, and a whole lot more.

Then, when you come back to your RiteCounter account page, our system compiles all that information and presents it to you in an easy to read, easy to understand, way.

In order to get the most possible benefit out of the information gathered by RiteCounter, you need to understand what you're looking at, so let's go through each feature, one at a time, and explain to you what it is, and how it can help your website:

Hosts: Refers to the number of unique visitors that have gone to the website today, yesterday, or in total. The more hosts you get, the better.

Hits: Refers to the number of times anyone has visited your page that day, even if one person has been there multiple times. If a single individual goes to your page twice in a day, that would be considered to be 1 host, but 2 hits. While a lot of hits are nice, it's a number that is easily inflated without adding too much value to your website.

New Hosts: Refers to the number of people who have visited your site that day that the system has never registered before. Keep an eye on this tally, because it can help you identify whether your marketing is working at its peak.

Links-Pages-Forms-Referrers: This box keeps track of how people came to your site. 'Links' refers to the links on other people's pages that have sent someone to your site today. 'Referrers' are things like search engines or emails that have sent people to your site with or without a permanent link. 'Pages' refers to the number of pages on your site where people have landed from elsewhere today.

This is a very important thing to watch, as this box will tell you which pages are, for whatever reason, drawing in a lot of traffic to your website. This information might change a lot over time, and you might find that new pages draw heavy traffic for a while as someone links directly to them, or a page drops off as users lose interest in the subject matter. On the other hand, a page that keeps coming back to this list is one you should possibly expand upon.

When a user comes to your website through a search engine, the 'keyword' they were searching for is sent ahead of them and received by RiteCounter. The 'three most popular keywords' box is where you can see which keywords are in most demand, which is again important information because it allows you to identify areas of interest to your users, which you might benefit from by featuring more prominently on your website. If you're a real estate agent and your 'condominiums page' isn't getting great traffic, but you're seeing a lot of condominiums searches going on, perhaps you need to look at how that particular page is put together, and if it could benefit from search engine keyword optimization to get the page indexed properly on the searchers..

Most Popular Browser: Many people aren't aware of this, but each browser has different ways of showing a webpage to the user. Some websites will only work with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and chances are you'll see that listed on RiteCounter as the most popular browser, but you should beware that not catering to other, smaller browsers, like Firefox and Opera, will lose you users. Firefox now has about 10% of the browser market, and Mac browsers and Opera aren't far behind. If they can't see your website, you'll lose their business.

Most Popular OS: Like the listing above, keeping an eye on what operating system your users are using helps you ensure that your website works for everyone. In the case of a software company website, this information might help you determine when it's time to put out a Mac version of your product, for example.

Most Popular Macromedia Flash: Many websites have Flash components coded into them, and though sometimes these are small things like animations that don't affect the way the website works if they can't be seen, other times Flash is used on important things like menus and site tools. If you are using Flash 7.0 technology, but you find the bulk of your users are using version 6.0, you might be limiting the usability of your website to those people by sticking with the brand new version.

Most Used Screen Resolution: A screen resolution refers to the monitor setting your user has on their computer. A lot of people out there have screen resolutions on their computer systems that work well for them, but are non-standard widths or heights, and when they design their websites, they create them to work best with their own system's set-up, which might not work well for others. With the information in this section of RiteCounter, you can ensure that your users aren't being limited by your screen width choices. Most people will be using 800x600 16-color settings, but over time, as screens get bigger, that might change to 1024x768 32-color, or 1280x1024, or 2048x768 (if they use two monitors side by side). Keep an eye on changes in preferences over time, and be certain that your website is built to suit.

This section is fairly self-explanatory; RiteCounter keeps track of how much traffic you're getting from each search engine, be it Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN, or something else. The 'count' statistic registers the number of hits from that search engine, and the '%' shows you what percentage of your search engine traffic comes from that particular site.

Where is your traffic coming from? RiteCounter keeps track of this information, and helps you be sure you're not spending money on bandwidth from countries that your website isn't supposed to be catering to. If you have a French website, and your traffic is coming mainly from Germany, then you need to reassess some of your marketing, otherwise you're just paying for bandwidth that is going to waste.

The information in this section refers to the in-depth details of the person who spent the most time on your website today. The information included in the section is as follows:

Came Date: The date and time the user arrived at your website.
Last Visit Date: The date and time the user was last at your website, either for a return visit, or because he stuck around a long time.
IP: In order to get from website to website, internet browser software uses a system of four-segment numbers (like 192.16.0.192) that are listed on a massive register and linked to each and every internet domain. This is called the Internet Protocol (or IP) address, and it tells you which internet service provider (or ISP) the user came from.
Hostname: While the IP is the number that 'the internet' uses to identify each domain, the 'hostname' is the actual domain and modem connection of his ISP. For example, 'proxy1.uoregon.edu' would tell you that the user came from the University of Oregon and was on 'proxy server #1', while 'local7.shaw.ca' would tell you that the user is logged in through Shaw Internet in Canada, on 'modem #7'. This information is not overly important, but it's handy to know where your most popular visitors are coming from, and even handier if a specific user starts trying to hack your website.
State/Country: Pretty self explanatory here - this is the nation your user is located in.
Timezone: This helps you see what the time is in that user's part of the world.
Hits: Refers to the number of times the user landed on one of your pages.
Whois: If you wonder where that user really comes from, the 'whois' tool allows you to look up his hostname and find out where his ISP is located, and even gives you a technical contact in case you need to stop this user from doing something wrong on your website.
Traceroute: when you visit a website, the information on that site is sent to you through a long spider's web of phone lines, from network server to network server, until it finally gets to your modem. The Traceroute tool is a handy feature that allows you to see the path that your user's 'signal' had to take across the internet to get to your website. The information includes the hostname of each step in the process, the IP, a time that the specific network server took to process the signal (in milliseconds), and the final number is a 'packet loss' percentage, which tells you if there's a glitch somewhere on that connection. A 100% loss means the user is behind a firewall.

Visitor path: This screen is very helpful, because not only does it give you expanded information about this user, including OS, browser, the language he uses, javascript version, and screen resolution, but it also shows you the pages he visited while he was there. This can help you track the navigation path your users take, to be sure each of your pages leads the user to where you want him to go. For example, if your pages are supposed to lead users to place an order, you ideally want each Visitor Path to end in your order page. If it doesn't, then you need to figure out why.

At the bottom of the page for each of your websites, you'll find a blue series of boxes with many links in them. These tools allow you to get even more detailed information, including graphs that break down all your figures for easy understanding.

On the page of each tool mentioned below, you will be given eight options for showing the information; today, yesterday, last two days, last three days, week, last two weeks, last three weeks, last 31 days. Clicking on any of these will adjust the information to register over that period of time.

Account: This link allows you to change the details of your website in RiteCounter's system, including Name of site, URL, language, country, description, category, package type and time zone.
Settings: This link allows you to change settings such as whether you want your stats to be public or private, the URL to send to others who might share your access to the RiteCounter system, a checkbox indicating whether you want graphs to be shown on statistic pages, another asking whether you want your site to be rated in RiteCounter (that is, whether you want it to be included in the 'top sites' page or not), and finally one more allowing you to have your RiteCounter stats automatically emailed to you each week.
Get Counter Code: If you need to add your RiteCounter code to another page on the site, this will allow you to get the proper HTML code you need to use.
Change Counter: If you decide that the RiteCounter hit counter you chose wasn't quite what you want on your website, this link will allow you to change it without changing any HTML on your website. Just activate a new style and it will automatically replace the old one on your page.
Blocked IP: This link allows you to block a given IP address from your statistics, which comes in handy if you're looking at your own website a lot, and finding that your own personal traffic is inflating numbers artificially.
Move Site: If you want to move your website to another RiteCounter account, just use this link to put the new login into the system.
Delete Site: This link should only be used if you're absolutely sure you want to take a website off your account. Once you confirm the deletion, all statistics will be erased.

This series of links allows you to see how many visitors your website had, as well as how many hits they registered on your website, over a period of an hour, a day, a week, a weekday, and a month.

Macromedia Flash Versions per Day: This link will show you what version of Flash your users are utilizing.
Javascript Versions per Day: This link will show you what version of Javascript your users are utilizing.
Operating Systems per Day: This link will show you what version and brand of operating system your users are utilizing.
Browser Localizations per Day: This link will show you what language setting your users are using on their computer, be it English or otherwise.
Browsers per Day: This link will show you what version and brand of internet browser your users are utilizing.
Screen Resolutions per Day: This link will show you what height in pixels, width in pixels, and what color settings your users are utilizing on their computer monitors.

Pages per Day: This link shows you which pages were visited today, and how many unique hosts and hits were registered on each one.
User's Route Around Your Site: This link shows you what path a given user (identified by his IP) took around your website. Just type in the user's IP address, local IP address, or hostname and let RiteCounter track him for you.
Countries Per Day: This link tells you where your web traffic is coming from at a country level.

Links per Day: This link tells you which links on your website your users were clicking. Very helpful in determining optimum site layout.
Unaccess Visits Per Day: This link shows you which other sites were using your site for their own purposes, like for example linking to your pictures, or copying your content.
Bots and Other User Agents per Day: When a search engine indexes your website, it registers on this page. Likewise, if automatic scripts are attacking your page as some form of hacker attack, you'll see it here.

Search Engines per Day: This link shows you the breakdown of which search engines are sending you traffic.
Keywords per Day: This link shows you all the keywords that were searched for on search engines that sent users your way. This page is a great way of keeping up with user interests and fashioning your content to suit.
Referral Pages per Day: This link shows you what pages on the internet sent users your way, and where they sent the traffic to. This is a good way to find out who is linking to you, and what their interests are.

Remember - the more pages your RiteCounter code is installed on, the more information these statistics hold. Got a second website? Hit the 'add a website' link in the menu bar and use RiteCounter for that one too!