Hit counter conventions

[Willmonwah]

This is directed at all webmasters or bloggers. I just wanted to get an idea of what you display on your sites (that have public counters)- page views or visits? If you count visits, any page views within a specified interval will count as part of the same visit.

Obviously, the page view counter will be bigger than the visit counter, so what do you prefer to be a more accurate representation of how popular your site is? Does it matter what kind of content you have?

[OSUKid7]

IMO, a hit counter screams 1998. Seriously, no big sites have them anymore. I say track your visitors in a private control panel. If you have a good, popular site, people will recognize that and you'll get more visitors. I say keep the information private unless there's a reason to share it.

[PocketPC Addict]

Traffic can be good for measuring visitor likes and dislikes. For instance if you write something in your blog that is a good read, people will link to it and your numbers will be up. So I wouldn't throw out the counter.

Count page views vs. hits. Unique visits is a good thing to count too.

[Willmonwah]

OSUKid7, I didn't think about it that way, but you're right.

For my blog, I wanted to let people know they were being tracked since I don't have a privacy policy (maybe I should make one :)). It's not really to show off, because I don't have that many regular readers.

Addict, that's a decent part of why I do it too. If I notice that google's sending a bunch of people to a particular post, I'll update it with more current/helpful info.

Thanks for the input!