If you run a blog – or for that matter, any website – you will probably want to know how many visitors it attracts. There is nothing conceited about this desire because setting up a site on the Web is, after all, an attempt to communicate with the world and it is natural to want to know how the world is responding.

A simple and popular way of counting visitors, and one that I started using myself (see my post Counter culture), is to install a “hit counter”. There are many of these available online, ranging in design from a plain number, through numbers beside visitors’ national flags to world maps showing visitors’ locations. Most of the simple ones are free while those that provide more extensive information may require a fee.

I soon realized that there are problems with the simple hit counter. The first, a practical issue, is that they count every hit on you blog, including a visitor refreshing the page. They also count all my visits, including those where I am viewing the blog to check on editing changes. All this leads to an inflated figure of supposed “visits”.

Then there is the question of what is meant by “a visit”. If the same person visits your blog several times during the day, do you count all these visits or only the first one? Some hit counters can be configured to record “unique visits”, that is, they count only a person’s first visit of the day and ignore all further visits until next day. Most of the simple hit counters do not offer this option.

The second problem is one that I alluded to in my previous post: to what use are the suppliers of free hit counters putting your blog? They have to make money somehow, so what, exactly, are they selling? At the very least, they will include a link in the counter so that anyone clicking on it will be shown advertising. What else might they be doing? Well, we don’t know really, do we? With these thoughts in mind, I deleted the hit counter.

I then took a look at the list of “widgets” supplied for use with the blog. There I discovered one called Blog Stats. WordPress collects very useful statistics about your blog and these are readily accessible to the blog owner. The widget Blog Stats copies one of the quantities from these statistics. So I put it in the sidebar and entitled it “Visitors”. Then I realized that the number that Blog Stats displays is not the number of visitors (unique or not) but the number of pages clicked on, referred to as “page views”.

A moment’s thought will make it obvious that that number of page views is not the same as the nunber of visitors. Any one visitor may click on several pages so the number of page views will be at least a large as the number of visitors but almost certainly much larger. So I renamed the widget in the sidebar to Page Views.

The annoying thing is that, though WordPress does keep a tally of the number of visitors (unique visits) from the start of the blog to the present moment and I can see it by looking at my statistics, there doesn’t seem to be any way to display this number in the sidebar. This is one reason why hit counters are so popular, I suppose.

“Page Views Culture” wouldn’t have the same punning ring as “Counter Culture”, and so this post has a rather tame title but it does at least pose the question that I hope the post answers.