What’s The Deal With Hit Counters?

Well other than to provide a tacky counter stuck somewhere on the page to usually stand out like a sore thumb, they were originally meant as a way of tracking traffic to your website…but it really is a rather primitive method.

What does a hit counter do? It tracks the number of times a page is loaded regardless of whether it’s a new visit or just a refresh of the browser window. Some may track unique visitors but by far they do not provide enough information to evaluate what your website and marketing message is doing for you.

It seems to me that hit counters rose to popularity early on in the life of the internet, primarily as bulletin boards, membership sites and other such forums wanted to demonstrate how popular they were. They began to decline when it became obvious that the website owner could seed these counters, either by refreshing the page manually himself hundreds or thousands of times or by just setting a high starting value in the code of the counter in order to make their site look more popular than it really was. Would people really fudge their counter numbers? Of course the would! As a website owner, you wouldn’t want a low hit count because people might assume you don’t offer anything of worth and move on without reading further.

The other problem with a Hit Counter is that the number they display really holds no useable statistical meaning by itself. Most of the counters track page loads which means every time the page is loaded or refreshed in the browser the ticker advances. This is not providing a true representation of the number of actual visitors you had.

Today, there is no need to install an ugly feature that displays a pointless number when most hosting packages now provide web statistics in the hosting control panel that can provide you with most if not all of the information you need. If your hosting package doesn’t have this or does not provide enough information you can always sign up and install something like Google Analytics on any page you wish to track. Contact your developer or web hosting company to find out how to access and use these statistics. Web statistics need to become an essential part of your marketing strategy.

And on that note, have a very Happy New Years – travel safe, and celebrate responsibly. Cheers!