Statistics are a highly valuable resource in the online world. Monitoring traffic at your site (an auction, a personal homepage, or even a business related site) is extremely helpful. Now, with Honesty Counter Statistics, anyone can watch their traffic and put this knowledge to good use.

First of all, in order to use our counters, you'll need to register with Honesty. This is a free service and once you have confirmed your registration you can create some counters. They can be used for an auction page or another website. Once you begin receiving hits, you will have some information that you can track.

In order to view this information you'll want to pull up your View Counters page. If you have Honesty Preferences set, make sure that you've selected to display the Counter # column in your View Counters Preferences. This option is on by default, so unless you've turned it off, it will appear. If you have turned it off, you can change your preferences by clicking here. You'll notice that on your View Counters page that the counts are all links. By clicking on any counter's count, you can access the statistics for that particular counter. Pick one and click on it.

The page you now see is your stats for a counter, but what does it all mean? Take a look at Figure 1, and we'll go over what you see in the first image on the page.

Figure 1

These are the hourly stats for this particular counter. The hourly stats are divided into three main sections. The header (Figure 1 - A), the main graph (Figure 1 - B), and the footer (Figure 1- C).

The header displays the current time and date on Honesty's systems. Next, is the main graph. Here's where all the important statistical information is held. At the far left, on the top of the graph, you'll see a number. This is the greatest number of hits you've received in any given hour, over the last day, on this counter. The bottom of the graph, represents zero, and the top represents the highest number your counter has hit over the past 24 hours. Throughout the graph, assuming you've received hits in the past 24 hours, you'll see green bars falling somewhere between the bottom of the graph and the top number. Along the bottom of the graph is a list of hours. As time passes, the numbers shift to the left, so that the current hour is always the farthest to the right. The current hour is displayed in grey, so that you can tell that it isn't complete yet. Finally, you have the footer at the bottom of the graph. The footer simply reports the number of hits in the last 24 hours, for that particular counter.

Figure 2

The hourly statistics are useful on a day-to-day basis, but to measure peak times on a given page, the second graph, our Daily Stats Graph, is a great indicator for longer periods of time. The daily stats are laid out in the same fashion as the hourly stats, as you can see in Figure 2. The division of the header (Figure 2 - A), the main graph (Figure 2 -B), and the footer (Figure 2 - C) is identical.

The difference with this graph, is that it displays a rundown of the stats on a counter over a period of days, starting with seven, and having as many as 30. Instead of seeing an hourly time period at the bottom of the graph, it is represented as dates. Initially, there is room for seven days of information, although as time goes by, and your counter is up for past seven days, the graph will compress to make room for more dates. Again, the only real difference in the footer of the daily graph, is that it shows you the number of hits over the total number of days (vs. hours for the first example) the counter has been up, for up to 30 days.

If you have anymore questions about statistics, their uses, or their workings, please email us at support@honesty.com.