5 Reasons Why I Replaced Feedjit With Statcounter

Feedjit is perhaps the most popular traffic counter commonly seen on a majority of free blogs (especially those hosted freely on blogspot). I fell in love with Feedjit when I was new to blogging and ever since then it became my first choice as a traffic counter.

Its intuitive way of displaying live visitors is still unparalleled to any traffic counter of its kind! If you are a regular reader of this blog then you might have noticed a small change - Feedjit gone! I replaced it with statcounter and there are 5 solid reasons that helped me coming down to this decision. Here they are:

1. It displays visitors' stats publicly

No one likes their surfing footprints to be displayed publicly and this is what Feedjit does! You can find the live traffic stream of any website using Feedjit at - live.feedjit.com/live/homepageurl/0/. Moreover, it also displays the exact search query used by the visitors to arrive at a particular webpage. I know that not everyone is offended at this notoriety, but I value the privacy of my every single reader!
Contrary to that, statcounter provides you with an option of invisible tracking - the ability to monitor the visitor activity right from your statcounter account. That's the very first reason i decided to replace it with statcounter.

2. Ad-supported & leaks out pagerank

Free version of Feedjit comes at the price of advertisements. When I'm not even using AdSense on my site then why should I tolerate those misleading text and banner ads? Secondly, from a webmaster's point of view – like any other widget, the feedjit widget also leaks the pagerank of the homepage. Contrary, statcounter's invisible tracking does the same job fairly well and that too without leaking out any pagerank.

3. A morbid obsession for traffic

Having using feedjit for over a year, it made me a traffic maniac. I was so obsessed with the live traffic stream that after every one hour I used to open that URL on my mobile device to count the number of visitors in a day. Besides giving me this unhealthy addiction, this morbid obsession also contributed around 30% to my mobile bill every month. Don’t know why I'm not at all obsessed with statcounter :P

4. Not seen on top blogs

One of the best things about blogging is that you can always learn from the top blogs in your niche. Have a look at Problogger and Copyblogger - they are not using Feedjit, perhaps because it's kiddish to boast off the traffic count & most importantly they value the privacy of their loyal readers at the very first place.

5. Traffic log limit

Feedjit has a short traffic log limit. In the process of tracking new visitors the old ones are lost! That's the final reason why I replaced it with statcounter (which provides full tracking details of up to 500 entries)

Congregating it all, here’s a detailed comparison table of the two traffic counters:

	Feedjit	StatCounter
Free	Yes	Yes
Ad Supported	Yes	No
Invisible/background tracking	No (the widget has to be present on the sidebar for the counter to work)	Yes (No need to add any widget, just add the tracking code in the html and you are good to go)
Traffic log limit	short & depends on how busy your website is	500 entries (log limit independent of how busy your website is)
Tracking type	Basic (just visiting country, browser, OS, source and exit links)	Advanced (besides basic tracking, it provides several advanced tracking details like IP, ISP, popular pages, average time on the site and much more)

So which one is your favourite traffic counter? Do you also prefer statcounter over feedjit? Feel free to share your thoughts!