Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Design and Content : Putting a Counter

[mantra]

I just signed up with TheCounter.com to place a counter on my quepons.com website.
I decided to put the code in the footer page which will be shown on all pages.

Is that ok? I mean are those statistics then valid if it counts on every page?

Do I just put the code on the front page and that's it?

Please give me your feedback.

Thanks

[ElysiumNet]

Putting it on the front page will make it more accurate, but maybe there is a way you can divide it up so that you can have separate counters on different pages.

[JTY]

I'd just put it on the front page.

[mantra]

great, thanks .. i just put it on the front page.

[anon-e-mouse]

If you want an indication of how many pages are visited etc, in addition to the counter on the main page, put one such as sitemeter on each page. www.sitemeter.com

[VRonline]

btw, you might want to try www.extremetracking.com . They provide an accurate and detailed prospectus.

[anon-e-mouse]

Yes I like extremetracking, I use that on "special" pages to get an indication of where people are finding it, who has linked to it etc Actually for the thread starter, that might be a better idea than thecounter.com

[jjmac78]

Keep in mind that most analyzer programs, such as http-analyze count every file, image, document, etc as a hit. For instance if you had a page with 10 images, the page would count 11 hits each time a person viewed it. (10 for the images, 1 for the page itself) These types of logs also include a page hits stat which is the number of times a page is viewed.

Just putting a counter on the front page still isnt accurate since a viewer can visit the front page any number of times while online.

You can track the number of new visitors by creating a session variable for the IP address of the viewer and log only one hit per IP per session. That way no matter how long a visitor stays on, it will only count one hit until the session expires and they return.

Not to mention you can exclude dup IP's if you're trying to get a number of unique visitors, but dial up users will likely change IP's when they log on, so its impossible to really tell with just a session variable.

The most accurate way I've found is to use a combination of cookies and sessions to log a hit for an IP for a session, and set a cookie. If the cookie exists next time that visitor comes then a hit is not recorded. This gives me the most accurate number of unique visitors I've found because in order for it not to work a viewer would have to have a dynamic IP that changes each time they visit the page, and have cookies disabled.

Lets be honest, most viewers on non-technical web sites dont even know what a cookie is, much less how to disable them

I guess it all depends on how accurate you want to be...

[VRonline]

um, actually extremetracking does count the unique visits to that page file and that page file only There are also ALOT of others which do this, take a look through www.hotscripts.com there are loads there which can do this for you, some even have things like showing information about the visitor, his referred site....

Nevertheless extremetracking is very easy to set up and is quite advanced itself, so I can see no reason why it shouldnt be a first option

[jjmac78]

Extreme tracking uses the hostname to determine unique visitors. The hostname, like the IP address, changes on dial up users. Extreme tracking does not take this into consideration, but I do.

Like I said, it all depends on how accurate you want to be.

Also keep in mind that looking up a hostname with reverse DNS (like extrem tracking) increases the workload and bandwidth use of the server - by more than twice as much as just getting the IP. On a busy site this may not be the best thing to do especially on every page.

Also, as you were saying about the information some trackers give you like referrer, etc can all be easily accessed by the server variables -- See this php documentation ..

Anyone can simply type in <?=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']?> and print out the referrer.. No big secrets here -- the problem comes when people use everything on every page without any cosideration. For example on my sites that get millions of hits per month, it would not be wise to get the referrer on any page except the page people link to because I dont need to know when my page is its own referrer.

Likewise if I did a reverse DNS lookup on every page on every hit for the hostname, it would generate TONS of uneeded traffic -- not to mention the hostname is seldom more helpful than an IP address (considering you can look up the provider of most IP addresses anyway) and for the expense is not worth it...

On smaller sites it wouldnt matter so much, but IMHO every application you write should be scalable -- theres no sense in planning on being a small site forever...