Looking for a free and not too nasty web counter

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m a student assistant for a professor at our law school and helping with the administration of his web site. For keeping track of the number of hits the site gets, where the viewers come from, etc, we are currently using a free service called Webstats4U. They offer a fairly good array of statistics you can delve into if you find out whatever you want about who accessed our page at what time and from where.

That company makes its money by displaying popup ads every time the web site they keep track of is accessed. While I understand they have to make money some way of the other, this is becoming really annoying, so we’re looking for an alternative.

Does anybody know a free service that offers user statistics of that kind and doesn’t tick off users with their ubiquitous popup ads? We were recommended Google Analytics, but their page is not entirely clear on the size and frequency of ads this product will display. Any experience or recommendations would be highly appreciated.

2

StatCounter is pretty nice. While you only will retain detailed information on the last 100 hits (with the free version), it places no ads on your website, allows a lot of customization, and does give useful reports.

3

I like Sitemeter. No popups there either, and the free version also only goes to 100 hits, but you can upgrade it for a fee. I’ve never bothered to, but I don’t get a ton of traffic.

4

If I wanted to add one of the counters to my blog at blogspot.com could I use them?

5

I use StatCounter on my blogspot blogs. What I like:

You don’t need to display anything on the page.
You can set a cookie for your own browser.
You can do multiple projects.

6

Google Analytics doesn’t display any ads at all: it’s completely invisible to end-users. I’m using it at http://www.vintage-toys.com/ – see for yourself. The data is great, very detailed.