[WEB400] Re: visit counters

["Jim Franz" <franz400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
What exactly does management want to know?

Hans,
A very good point. This is coming from the owner, and he, in a very
non-tech way wants to know if his site is being viewed. They did not want
to pay for any placements, but I did post to as many search engines as I
could find. The meta tags are filled for the crawlers. It is a very simple
"brochure" site, on an extremely limited budget. I've already created a
query over the log files, and filter it to an ip address and date, so he can
get "visits" and see if amyone comes back. Hopefully they will want to move
beyond brochure.
jim
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hans Boldt" <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 9:30 AM
Subject: [WEB400] Re: visit counters


> Jim Franz wrote:
> > Is there a way to count visitors on a static page (html only)?
> > Management wants to know.
> > jim
> >
>
> Others have provided some good technical answers. But the first question
> is: What exactly does management want to know? The logs will tell you
> how many "hits" your page received, but that's not very useful since
> many hits will be from bots, and not necessarily people (potential
> customers?) looking at your page on a monitor. Looking at the logs, you
> can sort by the user agent and then figure out which are bots and which
> are browsers (assuming the bots don't lie!).
>
> As someone else pointed out, if you want to count the people viewing
> your page, you could count the hits to some unique image loaded by that
> page, since the bots generally have no need to fetch images.
>
> Unfortunately, one thing the logs won't tell you is how long a visitor
> looks at your document, or if they even read past the title banner.
> Webmasters know that a lot of people will find their page in a Google
> search, have a quick glance, and decide immediately that they need to
> keep searching. Perhaps a more meaningful measurement is how many
> (non-bot) visitors actually bother to visit other pages on your web site.
>
> Cheers! Hans
>