RE: Re: visit counters

Hey Hans... Check out that site I emailed out. Or for that matter, the one
that David sent out. It tells you how many vistors (unique), how many
visits, how many pages per visit, and removes the bots from the count. It is
very interesting. Of course it can only go by IP address. But still, it is
better than nothing at all.

Mike Wills
Lawson Programmer/Administrator
Taylor Corporation
Email: mnwills AT taylorcorpNOSPAM DOT com
AIM: iSeriesCodePoet

-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Boldt

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