A statistic counter is very usefull for a website in many ways.  Not only it counts how many visitors come to your website, it allows you to see where those visitors ocme and how they come so you can improve your website according to your statistics.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a great tool towards your website statistics.  It gives you a great range of statistics.  You can check where your visitors come from including continent, country, states, and cities.  You can tracke which langugae they speak.

The most important thing about statistics is that you can check what keywords they write to come to your website in search engines.  This can give a big advantage, you can improve your website in that area and have more impact over your visitors.

Google analytics has marketing tools.  You can combine Analytics with Adwords and get custom reports on your marketing tools.

You can get reports on your internal pages, how much a certain page is being visited and so on.  You can see what websties refer to your website and how many visitors come directly.

There is many other statistics websites but they never give a great service like Google Analytics.  In Analytics you can even customize your dashboard on how you recieve and want to see your statistics.

Keep in mind that this service is free and has many features, if you already have an Google account you can just add this service to your product list for free.  Google accounts are free.  Remember that you can turn a statistics counter into money buy improving your website to what the visitors are coming and searching your site for.