sagr wrote:
I like the idea of counting raw page views as it gives me an idea of which pages are most popular.
You need to distinguish between: - me viewing three different pages - me viewing the same page three times in one session (ie a few refreshes) - three people viewing the same page
You could make a note within a session cookie which pages have been viewed by the visitor and only increment the counter if the page isn't already in the session cookie. You'd still get counts of each page, just not the refreshes.
Otherwise, can you tell how many people have come to your homepage? Given that a typical visitor probably goes to and from the home page as they navigate around the site?
I am not sure about your session idea. I do not understand the concept fully but it sounds like this will just record the first page a visitor loads. I suppose this could be a handy stat to have in addition to raw views as I suppose this session count would give an indication about the first page a visitor loads on our website. Our website is very simple and basic at the moment but this coming year we hope to greatly increase the number of pages and amount of content so I suppose there is a chance our website may then become listed on Google et al. When this occurs I suppose your session idea would let us discover which pages people arrive at via search engines as well as how man unique visitors we get.
To be honest if you're serious about this there are lots of 3rd party apps that do all the hard work for you. For example I've just started playing with phpMyVisites (it originated in France hence the spelling). With tools like this you can work out all sorts of things about landing pages, routes through the site etc. Also look up Google Analytics as a free 3rd party service.
Also, you might find that a CMS package (Joomla, CMS Made Simple, etc) might make it easier to build an maintain your site, and most of them build tracking into the sites automatically. You would of-course need PHP (and MySQL) on the host site for that to be relevant.
That notwithstanding, it's worth learning the stuff yourself for your own benefit.