Wondering why the hit counter on our home page seems low?

One of the ways of judging the apparent popularity of a website is to look at the hit counter. However, hit counters can be very misleading.

Our website was completely redesigned in 2008 and then some time later we changed to a new URL. A new hit counter was started at that point. However, it does not pick up all our hits because a great many hits are coming to our old URL and are being redirected. It may be years before we can find all the links to our old URL on the Internet and get them changed!

Also, we feature our courses in a number of international directories. Some of these have full information so that visitors don't really need to look at our site at all to decide whether to enrol. Those directories give us many thousands of hits that don't clock up on our hit counter!

Another source of hits that don't affect the counter is links to specific pages that lead people directly to specific courses. We have such links on various places on the Internet. Again, they generate significant hits but don't affect the home page counter.

Research by web traffic experts has revealed that most people today don't visit the home pages of websites. Instead they Google what they want, zero in on the specific page of a site, and then make a decision. The whole concept of a home page, and the advantage of having a unique URL, may be redundant!

Of course we could have hit counters on every page to help tell us which pages are the most popular. But we are not nerdish enough to want to waste time reading them obsessively - we have better things to do, and other ways to easily determine the popularity of individual pages. Hit counters aren't everything.

Now, anyone who knows anything about website design knows that hit totals can be faked!  We recently came across a rival school that was set up actually mimicking the wording of some of our associated websites. They had a really huge hit count.  How many miles is it from the Earth to the moon? But all you have to do to get that is to specify a "starting count" when you start using a web counter!  In other words, think of a number, double it, and enter it, and your count can start from as high as the counter will allow!  Is that giving the consumer misleading information, or isn't it? 

Not only can you do that, but you can also "feed" many counters by repeatedly clicking on your own website to generate fake hits!

So, web counters can be very misleading.  And do you notice that many big or well-established web sites don't have a publicly displayed hit counter at all?  Of course they gather statistics, but big businesses don't want to publicly parade the relative popularity of each of their pages.

Conclusion: take our hit counts with a pinch of salt - the actual hit counts are much higher. And take the astronomical hit counts of any competitor with a huge mountain of salt - they are probably a figment of somebody's imagination. And if that is, maybe something else on their site is too.