Website Counter Questions

We just put a counter on our website to track how many visitors we get. At this point, we only have the counter on the home page. When we look at the details we can see how many of the hits to the home page are returning visitors, and how many are new. We can also see where they came from and a bunch of other stuff. We intentionally put the counter only on the home page because we want to get as close to a true number of visitors as possible (that's one of the issues we had with crazyguy - each time anyone clicked on any of our pages, it counted as one hit. In other words, one person could read the whole journal and rack up 350 hits).

However, I was just reading about how you can use the popular pages data to help set up the website - we can figure out which pages don't get much traffic and try to direct people there with other links and such. That sounds like a good idea. To do that, however, we would need to put the counter on each page. Would putting it on each page just give us a total number of hits for the entire site?? Or would it itemize the list so we know how many are on each page?

For those of you who know this stuff, what kinds of tips and suggestions can you give me? I can see how getting that tracking could be useful once we are really gearing up for our next big trip, but I'm not sure how best to set it all up. Thanks for whatever help you can give me!

We have all of that with the counter we put on. But we aren't sure how it logs the counts. We feel that the number of hits we've gotten on our online journal is misleading - sure it's nice to look at that 630,000 number and think, "Wow!! That's a lot of people!" But on the other hand, given the fact that we get one hit registered for EVERY page somebody goes to, it really isn't that many individual people. On our website, we can get the data we want - if we go in and search. But we would like some kind of counter that is displayed right there so that any ol' Joe Blo can look and see how many PEOPLE have visited our site. We will be seeking out sponsors for our next big journey and I would love to point a company to our website and say, "You can see how many visitors our site gets." Does that make sense?

statcounter.com is the one we are using! It is great and there is so much info - but we don't know how they register the hits in the total number. Will the number be different on each page? Or will it all tie in together for all the pages?

We're going to do it - and see how it works. I think we will get individual page data, my husband thinks it will all be lumped together. I guess the only way to see what happens is to do it!

Medievalist said:

Dude, a counter displays the number of times a page is loaded, if it's decent, many of them however, display the number of hits, which is not, at all the same thing.

Click to expand...

I'm ignorant. What's the difference?

Yikes!! So we want page loads then - which is good, since that's what we have.

statcounter.com does give us the unique visitors info and where they've come from. We've only had it up for two days now and we've already learned a lot! Quite a few people have come to our site through another that I didn't even know existed!! It's a wonderful website about families that are out traveling, and we've had 8 or 9 people come to us via them. All this website stuff is all new to me.