A couple of years ago it was very fashionable to have a 'Hit Counter' on your website. It supposedly showed the whole world how many 'hits' you've received to date. As with all trendy fashions, the Hit Counter as we knew it has seen its day. Today you run the risk of being labelled a newbie, or a hobby website owner if you have a hit counter on your website. ~ The problem with hit counters are the following ~ - Nobody is quite sure what these 'hits' are counting. As you will see, collecting detail about website statistics is not as straightforward as it sounds. A hit could be anything from a unique visitor to the fact that you've displayed 5 graphical elements on your site (in which case, 5 hits will be recorded!)
- Hit counters are very easy to manipulate. It is not unknown for a desperate webmaster or website owner to set the hit counter to start at a vastly inflated number. Hit counters can also easily be reset - again to any number that you feel like.
- If you have a website with very low traffic, do you really want to proclaim that to the world? Especially if you are trying to promote your website for advertising purposes (let this be a warning to anyone wanting to advertise on a website - first do some investigation into how much traffic the website gets before laying out big money).
Collecting accurate traffic statistics is not straight forward. Different website statistics tools also have different ways of referring to the traffic. Let's look at some common definitions, starting with 'hits'.
