Real time visitor count on OTHER website?

Question

Currently I'm trying to find out the number of visitors on a certain web page on 'real time'. Something that is like WhosOn or Whos.among.us but not for your own web page. Perhaps you could see through an iframe etc and you can see the live visitor count. Just wondering if it is possible. If it is, please tell me the details.

This is for visitor count research for number of visitors on a popular website at different times of the day.

Answer 1

It isn't possible.

Even sites which claim to have a live visitor count just estimate it based on the number of places that have requested pages in the previous few minutes (or they make the numbers up to make themselves look good).

Answer 2

if it's you webpage then it's easy. You can use google analytics to see how you are doing. That requires that you put some javascript on the page that will feed back the statistics to them.

As long as it's your page and you can edit it to put some tracking code it's simple. If it's not your site then you should search their page code to see if they use a service that does this...and not only that....but that makes the data public (google analitics doesn't). Trackers like these (trafic.ro for instance) exits as a marketing tool. basicly if you use it you can show advertisers how many users you have and ask for more money.

As a last resort (they don't use any such tracking system) you can try on alexa.com. Anybody using alexa's toolbar is submiting the links they visit to them so they have some statistic. From that number they extrapolate to find the number of real visitors (those that don't use alexa). I found it to be wrong on many ocasions though :(

Answer 3

It is only possible if the website is YOURS.

You cannot find out "exactly" how many visitors go to xyz.com!

(Try to find out how many people are on-line on YA! would be a great result, but I doubt you will ever manage, unless you are a VERY experienced hacker...)

There are several free counters (i.e. www.statcounter.com), but these require you to add a peice on code on every single of your pages.

Nevertheless, even these will not tell you how many users are there between 00:00 and 01:00!

If this is a proper student RESEARCH, you may contact the sites you want to watch, with recommendations from your Uni: they might agree to help you: it is up to the site OWNER to do something...

Answer 4

I am not sure, what David (the person who repliedto this first) said is true. If that was the case, how does Google Analytics and Microsoft's same-alike work?

My personal thought is, it is definitely possible to get the visitor count on your site. I use the one provided by Microsoft with their Office Live account. It gives the following information for my website (http://www.KasiViswanath.com):

How many new people visited

Total visits so far

Most visited pages in the website

Pages where most of the people entered

Pages where most of the people exited (meaning finished watching the website)

How may referrals were there to your website

Few of the above information are fine grained at a level that, they tell you these stats per week/month and so. Very useful.

My website is http://www.KasiViswanath.com

If you have not yet purchased a domain name, then this information might be helpful. Then, it might also be worth watching Google Apps and Analytics bought with a BigDaddy.com account.