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Online Manual - Counters
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Counters

As I've said before, visitor counters on pages don't really tell you anything. However, you still might wonder if you should use one or not. It is really up to you. Counters can do you as much harm as good, but they probably won't do anything for you either way.

Most people include counters in their home pages because they might not have access to their log file, or they might not even have a log file. If you want to use a counter only to get an idea of the traffic to your site, then I suggest talking to your provider to see if you can get access to your log files and forgetting about the counter.

It is inaccurate to rely on a counter to gauge the number of visitors you have coming to your site. I've seen many sorts of pranksters out on the Internet who link to other people's counters. They only link to the counter program and thus can make it increase without ever visiting your page. One person in particular, has a hobby of collecting these links and every time someone visits his page, all the counters he is linked to increase by one.

Alternatively, you could use a free Internet service such as the Internet Audit Bureau. They keep track of the number of times a page has been visited for you at no charge. They do this by having you place a link to a small image, (their logo), somewhere in your home page. Each time your page is loaded, it retrieves the logo from their site and provides them with your special registration number for that page. By clicking on the logo and going to the IAB's home site, you can view the statistics for your page foe every day.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this system. It only records those people who view your page with images turned on. If the reader does not have in-lined images turned on, then their logo never loads and the visit is not counted. The other problem is that if IAB's server is busy or down, your page may dramatically slow down or get stuck loading while waiting to access the image.

However, too many people get sidetracked on this "hits" or "visitor" number game. What you really are interested in is the number of sales that your page is generating on the Internet. Of course, if you are not selling much, and the number of visitors to your site is high, then maybe your product is not attractive.


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