  Confining QCD-like theories close to the conformal window have a ``walking''
coupling. This is believed to lead to a light singlet scalar meson in the
low-energy spectrum, a dilaton, which is the pseudo Nambu--Goldstone boson for
the approximate scale symmetry. Extending chiral perturbation theory to include
the dilaton requires a new small parameter to control the dilaton mass and its
interactions. In our previous work we derived a systematic power counting for
the dilaton couplings by matching the effective low-energy theory to the
underlying theory using mild assumptions. In this paper we examine two
alternative power countings which were proposed in the literature based on a
phenomenological picture for the conformal transition. We find that one of
these power countings fails, in fact, to generate a systematic expansion; the
other coincides with the power counting we derived. We also point out that the
so-called $\Delta$-potential coincides with the tree-level potential of the
former, invalid, power counting.
