What is the use of a web page counter?

If you install a web page counter you can easily follow the number of visitors to your web site. This way, you will know which pages are the most visited pages of your website. Then, using the counter results, you may choose to place some important information that you want to make available to the public, or simply find out why visitors come to your website and what they are most interested in. For instructions on setting up a counter, please refer to the following Knowledge Base document: How do I setup a counter on my website?

To improve the efficiency of the tool for your marketing purposes you may manipulate the values. For example if you have some data from an old counter and for any reasons you cannot continue to use it you can transfer that data to your new counter. For instructions on changing the value of your counter, please refer to the following Knowledge Base document: How can I set my counter to display something other than 1 when I create it?

A counter is a string of numbers used to display how many people have visited the web page on which your counter is installed. Counters, however, do not "count" visits from actual people; they count page impressions. Page impressions are the number of times a web page is requested from the server. This is the preferred counting method for traffic measurement (instead of hits) because it only counts documents, not individual files. A single HTML page is counted as one page impression.

A hit is the request for and delivery of a file (such as a web page) from the server. Each element of a requested page (including graphics, multimedia, and the HTML file itself) is counted as an individual hit. So, if a web page contains five graphics, then accessing that page will generate six hits. Hits were originally used to determine the amount of traffic a website received, but since businesses eventually needed to isolate the exact number of times a web page was requested (in order to charge for ad banners), the method of counting hits was tossed aside. Instead, businesses count the actual HTML page requests. There was also a time when, in an effort to say that such-and-such website got more hits, programmers and designers were told to add as many elements as possible, to make the number of hits look higher. In actuality, all this technique did was slow down the download speed of the pages.