In the past, Web people thought it would be useful to tell people how many visitors the site has had. The idea behind it was that each visitor would see a figure and think "oh, this site must be good, it has had X number of visitors" and elect to stay with the site. It was basically a gimmick. So counters were born in various shapes and sizes and more and more sites used them until someone realised it wasn't actually adding anything useful to the site: the numbers meant nothing to the visitor especially if they were really high. And if the numbers were low or perceived to be low, depending on how long the site had been up, then visitors often left before going any further. Plus the counters were virtually useless for Web site owners. They didn't provide any useful information other than the fact that there were a certain amount of visitors. There was no way of knowing how many of these visitors were "unique" i.e. new to the site.

Behind-the-scenes Web tracking software now makes it possible to get rid of the counters and most professional sites have. Google Analytics allows them to track their visitors much more comprehensively and use the statistics to guide their marketing efforts.

See our to Better Google Analytics Reports