How do you keep count of the growing number of visitors to the Web site you've just built for your school/business/fanzine/pet dog? And is it possible to know more details about them - such as where they've come from, or how long they've stayed on your site?
At one end of the scale, there's a surprisingly large number of free services and facilities for measuring Web audiences (more of them in a sec). At the other, a major site would probably use some of the following methods to garner audience statistics:
If its Web pages are hosted by a commercial Internet service provider (ISP), basic traffic statistics should (but might not) come as part of the service;
If you are running your own Web server, its software should be able to log visitors. You can then either make your own home-grown routines to analyse the logs, or buy site analysis software (e.g. Interse's Market Focus, Net.Genesis's Net.Analysis, or O'Reilly's Statisphere). Log file analysis can give a lot of information, from numbers of visitors at particular times to peak traffic periods and which sections/pages are the most popular.
Cookies. Nothing to do with biscuits, these are sort of like mini-logbooks - they are stored on your visitors' computers and keep track of where they have been. But cookies raise privacy issues; many users also regard them as awkward and refuse to accept them or disable them in their browser's "preferences". So relying on cookies alone leads to inaccurate data.
Free solutions
But supposing you are a more modest operator such as a school, or a small firm or an individual, and none of the above is an option. All you want is a free counter on your main page. Let's assume, too, that you are using free Web space in the likes of Geocities or Tripod (see Computimes, January 12th). Some of these services do provide free counters for members (as well as personal "guestbooks" and various other free services). But even if they don't, there are many other counters you can grab for free and put on your page - see the links at the end of this article.
Counters also come in many shapes, typefaces, colours and sizes. Some services will lumber you with a horrible banner ad, and a few that we've come across aren't accurate - they even reset your counter to zero for no apparent reason. For all these reasons it pays to shop around (even if the services are free).
Generally you will find that you can track as many pages as you wish, but you will probably have to register each one separately. You might not want to put a counter on every page in your site, but try placing ones on all its major "crossroads" to give some general idea of the traffic patterns. A few services such as Siteflow (www.siteflow.com) restrict you to just one counter per site - and in Siteflow's case it starts charging a small fee if you have more than 500 hits a day. Be wary too of counters that only work with Java or JavaScript-enabled browsers. These will ignore visitors who don't have Java, and we find that some of them (such as JCount, at www.jcount.com) can slow your pages down a fair bit.
Free statistics
How do you get something more detailed than the overall number of "page-views" of one or two pages? A growing number of companies including PageCount (www.pagecount.com) and SuperStats (www.superstats.com) will also track your visitors for free (again, most of them are advertising driven). For each page you earmark, they give fairly detailed activity reports.
While counters are obviously on public display, you will have to log on to the statistics site with a password to see these more detailed statistics.
With free stats and counter services, you usually have to cut and paste about two or three lines of HTML code into your page, but you should be a dab hand at this by now. The code means that a logo (and more often than not an average-size banner ad) will be pulled from the statistics site and inserted into your page. When a visitor comes along and the logo is called up from the stats site, its database then does its business.
If all this looks like too much bother, you could always try the Fake Counter Homepage (at www.geocities.com:80/ SiliconValley/Heights/5910/ counter.html). It's maintained by a young molecular geneticist from Italy called Federico, for people who "think that an applet is a fruit, perl is a jewel and cgibin is a Chinese dish". It's just one of many Web collections of daft, marvellous, ornate and animated counters. Nothing like an image of a broken counter surrounded by the phrase "You are visitor number. . . (if that pesky counter hasn't broken yet)."
Finally, think of all those other, less obvious ways you might use counters. For example, here's a neat trick: use counters to conduct an online poll. Create links to a "Yes vote" page and a "No vote" page, then put a (separate) free counter on each page. Aha - but how can you see how the vote is going without clicking on the Yes and No pages and affecting the counters? A quick solution (and a way of keeping an eye on severe voterigging) is to get a statistics tracker such as SuperStats to follow each page too. Now you can log on at SuperStats to check how each tally is going, without affecting the figures. And, of course, you don't have to be confined to a Yes/No scenario - you could use the same technique for half a dozen choices.
Michael Cunningham is at: mcunningham@irish-times.ie
Some free counter links:
Aaddzz (www.aaddzz.com)
Atwill (www.atwill.com)
Internet Count (www.icount.com)
Free guestbooks
Guestworld (www.lpage.com) has already provided free guestbooks to over half a million Web site owners.