Statistics counter are numbers that are commonly seen at the bottom of the webpage, sometimes at the left side bar or at the right. They record the number of clicks that each visitor has browsed your web page. They mostly come from different countries. Do you have a favorite brand of stats counter? Which do you prefer, a visible or invisible one?

What I look at more often are SmarterStats. And I never trust visible stat counters to reflect true traffic.

Agree with steve here - such scripts are mostly poorly coded - only services like google analytics can give you good overview on website statisctics.

I like Google Analytics (Urchin previously). I ran them on HostingDiscussion.com for a few months and found that I was actually getting just as accurate information from Awstats, so I stopped using Google stats.

However, Google Analytics is a great program for those who are also running AdWords to track those conversions and study the relationship between conversions and nature of traffic.

I like statcounter as it is simple and do not require any technical knowledge, However it has no goal tracking feature like Google analytics but it works fine for beginners.

i would suggest either google analytics or smarterstats. I believe you can get a 1 domain free version of smarterstats from smartertools.com

Counters on pages show how popular (or unpopular) a site may be. I personally don't think that's anybody's business but the site owners. They can easily be manipulated anyway.

Personally, I use Analytics on all sites I operate and it does a very good job. AWStats does show some stuff which is handy to overview, but I load up my google analytics every 2 or 3 days to evaluate marketing trends etc.

If you are not familiar with google analytics then you could use statcounter as this is very easy to use and user friendly, i have also used statcounter initially.

use of a counter on the front page is the past and really clutters up a website, dont use a counter, use analytics, if you want the best check out Clicky!

I completely agree. From my experience Google Analytics and Awstats are the best two tracking tools I came across so far.

I use awstats but I also use one called Advance Logger. Its a perl script that keeps its own logs. I like it because it accurately tracks referring web sites including search engines and the key words. I can see the key words for a search engine and then click a link to take me to the results page of the search engine to see exactly where my site is ranked on those keywords.

Its not free but its pretty cheap.

I like Google Analytics. It works great.

Personally, I like Google Analytics. Some statistics counters are coded poorly.