Statistics of your site's activity are made possible by placing hidden code on your page, in this case within the code of an advertising banner. Every time your page is viewed, a signal is sent back to the provider of the service. Their computers can tell what country the visitor is from, what browser he/she is using, what operating system, what page they were on before they arrived at your site, whether they are first time visitors or not. And more. There are several companies out there offering this kind of service, all are capable of the same break downs. MyComputer.com is the best I've found, and will be tracking your site's traffic.

These stats are broken down any way you want - hourly, daily, weekly, pie-charts, bar-graphs. You will have the username and password into your account, and you'll be able to look any time. It very satisfying to see the increase of traffic from one hour to the next when you send out a newsletter, or you become feature artist at one of the Mp3 sites, or whatever. It's also very interesting and enlightening to see where your visitors have arrived from - what link led them to your pages. You can also see if any one has arrived via a search engine, and if so, what key-words they entered.

You never find out exactly who the visitor is, so there is no invasion of privacy, but the information is invaluable as a marketing tool. As I mention elsewhere, stats saved me wasting my time placing classified ads for my book. I could see that they just plain don't work. On the other hand, stats can instantly confirm whether a new link is bringing traffic, or whether, for example, the mention in your newsletter of a contest you're staging is working.

Counters are old hat. If traffic is slow to build, it's better for your visitors not to see that only 83 people have visited your site. I know I lose interest if I see that. Artificially boosting your counter's setting to look busy is plain silly, or setting your counter to 83.243 as a start figure. Nobody is fooled by it and you won't feel good about it. We'll give you a counter if you want, but we don't recommend them.