On 8/4/2008 6:05 PM, Kush wrote:
Can "distinct host served" be considered as visits, or come close to it?
If I visit your website at 9AM and at 9PM, would you consider that to be
2 "visits" or one 12-hour long "visit"? There'll only be one "distinct
host served".
If a company with 1,000 employees has a proxy server, and 30 people from
that company visit your website, there'll only be one IP address showing
in your logs. Do you want to count those 100 "visitors" as 1 visit, or
as 30 visits?
If some of your users are with ISPs that use load balancing proxy
servers (a "farm" of proxy servers, with requests being shared between
them), then a single user might show up in your logfiles with 10
different IP addresses for a single "visit", but 10 "distinct hosts served".
http://analog.cx/docs/webworks.html
The closest that you can get to a reliable count of "visits" is to
assign each "visitor" a "session_ID", a transient cookie with a limited
lifetime of 15 or 20 minutes. That will typically require specific
support on the server side, and will undoubtedly annoy some part of your
audience. And it requires assumptions about the way your users use your
site. And if you're going to start making assumptions, you can start by
admitting that if you change your assumptions, you're going to get
different answers, even if you start with the same data.
Aengus
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