How do websites use hitcounters to drive traffic

Question

I am looking for a way to keep track of the number of hits to a particular webpage. When the number of hits reaches a certain number traffic is driven to a different web page. Specifically I could use this to mod the number of hits by different values and drive people to different webpages on this logic. Do free web traffic analytics software solve this problem for me? Do they give me access to the numbers for me to manipulate?

I am a novice web programmer and an intermediate level C/C++ programmer. I am currently attempting to build the website using .NET MVC framework, but I am open to other ways of attacking the problem (Ruby on Rails or OpenLaszlo).

Answer 1

What is your goal with this? If you are going to base logic on the visits I wouldn't rely on 3rd party software since there is a usually a delay in tracking and it could be down (most free analytics packages have poor up-time). You would want to create a table in the database that includes a record for each page with a counter and just update that counter whenever someone visits the page, then you can base your logic off that data.

If you give me more information I might be able to help more, are you trying to do this for a specific reason? It seems like a strange requirement.

Answer 2

Just to add what james said. The better solution would be handling it yourself by tracking the hits. But Google Analytics has an API which I think can be used in this scenario. I have not worked with it but I think it can be used. But my personal opinion is that if there is not much benefit from what you are trying to do than you better dont do it. ;-)