web visitors?

[Ron Gatrelle]

I was just recently at a butterfly web site.  The home page said I was
visitor x,xxx.  By the time I had roamed around the site and left the "You
are visitor number" _____ had gone up by four.  Actually, what had happened
is that the meter was not counting visitors at all - it was counting hits -
so each move I made while at the web site clicked the meter up one more
number.

This is kind of a mild pet peeve of mine.  I say kind of as I think most
people who put up a web sites and then utilize a counter do not
intentionally intend to mislead those who "visit" the site into thinking
the site is hugely popular and very busy.  But some surely know exactly
what is happening and_ intend_ to deceive.  Try this.  If the caption says
"you are visitor"  run your cursor over the meter.  Often the meter will
have a pop up sign that says "hits" or "visitors"  (This was the case at
the site I visited.) IF the info on the pop up window matches the caption
fine.  If not, there is a problem.  Also, you can do what I did.  Go to the
site, make a note of the visitor number and leave.  Come back in about one
minute or two and you will see that the number has gone up by one - your
second visit.  Now, move around a good bit on site and go back and  forth
to the home page and see if the number changes most of the time you hit
home.  If this happens it is counting hits not visits.

Let me use our TILS site as an example.   In just over a year we have had
7,645 visits and 176,694 hits. We post both of these on our home page and
update our stats once a day (about 5am). As you can see a site gets many
more hits than visits - which is why most web site counters are counting
hits and _not_ visits (even if they say "visits" or "visitors").  Also, any
time the same computer visits a site it counts as a "new" visit.

The stats compiler we use keeps track on the following: hits, files, pages,
visits, sites, Kbytes, user agents, search strings, total referrers, total
sites (place from where the visitor came), sites by Kbytes (how much you
downloaded), entry and exit pages, times of day, URL by Kbyte, total URLs
hit etc, etc.  It is my understanding that most stat programs people use do
about all this same stuff.  Sooooo, there are any number of things to
choose from to post on the site itself.  Hits have been the stat of choice
for a long time at most sites.  People should not call a "hits meter"  a
visitor counter.

I like visitors best as it gives the closest idea of just how many people
come to a web site per day.  In September TILS averaged 29 visits per day
from 597 unique sites over the month -- 19 hits per hour and an average of
5,807 Kbytes were downloaded per day to users.

Ron Gatrelle




 
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