Individual post visitor counter with Google Analytics

Installing separate visitor counter for each individual blog post is a frequent blogger request. So far, we can only install visitor counter for the whole blog, not for individual post. However, with Google Analytics which store an enormous amount of data plus allow you to analyze the data in great number of ways, it is now possible to have a pseudo individual post visitor counter (or on closer inspection, it is not pseudo but real provide you choose a relevant keyword to filter).

Now if you are logged into Google Analytics Dashboard, click on CONTENT > CONTENT BY TITLE, you will see a box for FILTER PAGE TITLE (see screen shot below):



Type into the box a suitable keyword to help identify the post for which you want to check and click GO. You will see a list of blog post titles with the number of pageviews etc. For example, I want to see how many pageviews were there for posts containing the word "categories", I type in the word "categories" and filter and you can see the results in the screen shot above.

Now you may even try to filter Google Analytics data by blog title by typing in the full title into the box to filter. For example, I typed in "3 column templates by Thur" and found that there were a total of 253 pageviews for that particular post (see screen shot below):

Update on Statcounter: No spyware

I use Statcounter to track visitors to my blog and have been happy with it so far. This email from Statcounter increased my confidence further. Thought you might want to read it:

A few months back, Statcounter was approached by an advertiser, offered lots of $$$, and asked to include a spyware cookie on all of our member sites…we refused on the spot.

You install Statcounter to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

In light of this, Statcounter wants to assure you that we track your visitors for you, only you and not any one else.

Which provider would you prefer??

Update 6 May 2007: For Statcounter to work, they must put their OWN cookie into the computer so that they are able to distinguish between returning visitors and new visitors. This is not for spying purposes and is completely different from putting a third party spyware cookie.