Sitemeter is modifying its business strategy as competition heats up among popular site traffic statistics services available on the Internet. Sitemeter has revealed that its migrating its current platform to start up a new one scheduled for the weekend of September 13th – 14th.
Some of the major announcements included that All Premium Accounts will only pay one flat fee of $6.95 a month or $59.00 a year, which will apply to all new signups and current paid accounts going forward. If you see the current premium rates below, that becomes very affordable for bigger sites with huge traffic.
Compare the basic and premium packages to see the difference.
Visit Counts will likely be higher as they have added the ability to track visits using cookies, which helps distinguish unique visitors far more accurately. Free service users with large volumes of visit traffic may notice lower visit counts.
Page View counts may be slightly lower, since their updated Bot Filtering Database will now exclude counts to your stats from automated Bots hitting websites.
SiteMeter Website and panel access will be unavailable during the Weekend of the Migration scheduled for the 13th-14th September, though your stats will still be tracked, all historical data will be migrated and all users will have to Activate their account again on the new platform to gain access to new stats.
They further inform that the counter display image will no longer be part of the tracking code. To still keep a counter, you need to install a separate code. This will give webmasters more flexibility in displaying the counter where they want, more options and faster page load times. Following the migration, all counter display images will change automatically to the static default SiteMeter icon.
We have been using the Sitemeter free services for several years and it has provided accurate stats across 500K pageviews for free. I hope the new platform continues to provide the great service. Several amazing tools have recently emerged and I particularly like Woopra, though its daily 10,000 pageview limit is inhibitory. Google Analytics is a very powerful free site traffic service for detailed site data, and a must have tool for webmasters. We run several traffic stats tools on our site and it all adds up to rich informative data to understand our site visitors better.