To counter or not to counter?
 

Hello,

Do you feel that it is a good idea or a bad idea to have a counter at the bottom of your gallery pages? Is there any drawback to having a counter there to see how many uniques you are getting daily or is it best to leave it off?

Also, would this affect sales in any way?

My opinion of counters is that they are a great way for your traffic to leave your site. Most of them don't give you anything except the stats and you should be able to get them from your host or by running your logs through some software like webtrends.

The two exceptions to this, that I've found, are

1) www.thecounter.com which has an "invisible" option so that the counter doesn't steal your traffic

2) www.paycounter.com who will pay you $0.05 per unique clickthru so you at least get something for the traffic you are losing to them.

TheCounter.com charges $15.95/year and the stats are pretty weak.

I just put PayCounter on all my doorways and I really like the referrer stats they give me but I haven't been using them long enough to receive any cheques yet.


If you want really detailed stats that will tell you where your surfers come from, what pages they visit and what pages they leave from (that one's key!) then something like WebTrends is the way to go.

Just my :2 cents:

You should really use XXXcounter.com

They are really fast and it is a great way of tracking Uniques to your gallery.

The one thing I'm not sure about is if I should be adding a free ezine type sponsor at the bottom of my galleries for those surfers that don't want to click on the main site that is advertised on the gallery.

What is a better way of promoting an ezine sponsor?

www.traffictrader.net with their invisible counter... but you have to host with http://www.swifthosting.net in order to be able to use it

-Xinnov