Counters - How and Why

Do you want to sort out which bits of your Web site are working and which aren't? Counters may be the way to go

No doubt as you've surfed the Worldwide Web, you will have come across sites which have bits of numerical information shown on them, purporting to be a tally of the number of visitors to the site. Quite why a Web site needs to show the world just how many people it thinks has visited is beyond this humble hack, but counters can have their uses - as long as you bear some basic gotchas in mind.

Gotcha 1 - Proxying and caching

Unless you're very, very clever with your HTML code, any surfer that visits your site via a proxy server is not amazingly likely to increase your counter. The reason for that is that they're not actually accessing your site to read the pages, but fetching them from their ISP's proxy server. What happens is that the first time someone using that server accesses your site, the pages they read are fetched from your server, but are stored in a cache on the proxy server. The next time someone wants to read your purple prose, they read it from the proxy.

So your counter (depending on its type) doesn't get 'tickled', and thus doesn't register the hit.

Gotcha 2 - You've already been here

Most counters provided by third parties don't register a second visit by the same surfer within a 24 hour period. You can discover which ones do and which ones don't by sitting on a home page that has a counter on it, and just keep pressing F5, which forces the page to refresh. If the counter is an 'I'll record every time this page is accessed, no matter what' type, then you'll see the figures increase. If not, then you may not (of course, it all depends on how many other people are accessing for the first time that day).

You can experiment by subscribing to a number of counters, putting their code on a page that isn't linked to from anywhere (so only you know about it) and play the F5 game to check them out.

Why, Why, Why?

So, why use a counter, or, as I'm about to suggest, a number of counters? Well, aside from the obvious 'look how popular my site is' aspect, you can use counters very effectively to track which parts of your site are getting decent traffic, and which aren't - and obviously, the bits that aren't are the bits you need to do some work on. So, how do you go about constructing a counter regime that can work for you?

To begin with, you probably want to know how many people are simply visiting your site - in fact, you need to know this, or other figures are pretty meaningless. I'd suggest that you find a counter that counts every hit, no matter what, on your home page, and put the code there. Unless you're particularly proud of your number of visitors, I'd also suggest that you use an 'invisible' counter here, although that's not vital.

The next thing to do is to decide how many sections of your website you need to track, and get counter subscriptions equalling that number multiplied by two. You'll use one of a 'pair' of counters to record the hits to an index, and another to record the hits to articles that the index points to. That way, you see a hierarchy of figures:

• The total number of visits to your home page
• The total number of visits to each index
• The total number of visits to articles in each genre

Here's the clever bit - If, say, you were to get 50,000 visits to your home page, and one index gets 40,000 visits, while articles under that index get, say 80,000 visits between them, you can say that that section of your site is doing pretty well.

If another index, though, only gets 500 visits, and the counter for its articles shows only 250, it's pretty obvious that that section isn't what your visitors are looking for - either that, or your navigation links aren't working to get them there. Whichever cause you discover, that section needs some work to be done on it!

By the same token, if you discover that one particular section of your site (an index) is getting outrageously high numbers of visits (using our 50,000 visits to the home page as a benchmark, let's say 500,000) then the chances are that one of two things is happening: either your section is so good that people are bookmarking it, or, alternatively, another webmaster is 'deep linking' to that index, without linking to your home page.

If it's the former scenario - people bookmarking the index, congratulations! You've obviously done a very good job on that bit of your site - but, it's also a warning for you - the rest of your site needs some work to gain the same popularity, or it needs to be dropped so you can concentrate on the popular section, and make that the main thrust of your site.

Congrats!

If it's the latter, well, it's sort of congratulations again, really. Obviously, other sites that handle the same sort of information as you think highly of your section, and are pushing traffic at you. It's possible, though, that they're stripping your frames (if you use a frameset to deliver some banner adverts, maybe), so you might want to discover whence these visits originate - which site is linking to your index or pages.

The clever bit here is that a good third party counter will tell you what the 'referring URL' is - that is to say, the page your visitor was on immediately before he came to you. If you see loads of referring URLs that are identical, you can go and see for yourself how you're being linked to - and if it's in a less than satisfactory way, you can take steps to get things put right.

Where to from here?

Our Surfer from Hell, quite rightly, detests sites that have barrowloads of visible counters sprinkled over every page. Generally, they serve no useful purpose. But, if you apply some thought to using invisible counters as I've outlined here, you can not only be a better Webmaster, you can also ensure that your site is constantly defended against copyright thieves. So, by all means use counters constructively - just be wary of visitors that say 'Hah! This site hasn't had many hits - I'm off elsewhere' when they see a counter with less than a gazillion hits recorded on it! Keep counters for your own use, and not a bragging tool.

There are loads of third party counters out there - I'd suggest doing a search on "COUNTERS" in your favourite search engine to have a look at a few.

 

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com