There are a lot of different ways to gather statistics for your blog or website. You might use the C-Panel area on your web hosting account to look at stats using the built in “webstats’ system, or you can place some code on your site that gathers information every time someone visits your site.
Most of the companies that have you place code on your site to gather statistics are free, but you must go to their website in order to see your sites stats.
I use an external statistics system called StatCounter. As I’ve described it consists of code that you place on your site – either on each page, or in a part of your site that is seen on each page.
I have a free account at StatCounter so I can only see stats on my last 100 visitors. You can purchase a subscription which will increase your log size and allow you to see more stats if you’d like.
I like the stats that this company gives me. I can quickly see where my visitors have come from, or see which domains have sent visitors to me, check to see what keyword searches on the big search engines have brought visitors to my site as well as a number of other stats on the visitors (browsers, country of origin etc).
I use StatCounter in combination with the statistics that I get through my web hosting account.