A Heated Debate! Your Input Is Appreciated!

[Jernet]

Over the years of buying and selling domains and websites I have found that one of the most important properties a domain or site can have is traffic.

The bad thing about this is that there are so many different ideas on what a daily unique visitor really is.

My personal opinion is, just what it says "Daily Unique Visitor", meaning one visit from one IP address in any given 24 hour period.

I believe this concept is so construed that it is disgusting. People counting 'hits' as unique visitors, counting 'pageviews' as unique visitors, and so on.

There are also places that count a unique visitor every hour, meaning that the same person can come back once every hour, and be counted 24 times in a day. Not very efficient I think.

Most people that use this forum I would assume have their own opinion on what a unique visitor is, and I would love to hear your input. I think this is a very important subject, and I hope others would agree.

I realize this may step on some toes of the guys who like to rig their counters so they can rip people off, and I apologize ahead of time to them

[stevey]

i agree with you, only thing is people who are on dialup have a different ip everytime they logon to the net, so if they logon log off logon again, if they do this a few times in the day they are counted as a different person, where at the other end of it, people who are on a network sharing a static ip can all visit a site and only be counted as 1 person, where it could of been 10 people. so it should be changed to unique IP's not unique visitors. Hits are how many times all the ips have visited the site, pageviews are how many times the ip has viewed the page

[Jernet]

Good points. I wonder if there is a way around the dialup, and static IP thing, or should that just be left to the law of averages?

I have seen trackers that, even tho they distinguish the difference between hits and unique visitors, they are still counting you every 15 minutes if you constantly keep coming back. End result; you can actually be counted as 96 uniques in one day.

[fatter]

I would say a unique visitor is a first time visitor period, if 1k people visit a site to play a daily contest and return every day the same 1k people then it might be deceiving to say gets a 1k uniques a day, a thousand visitors a day would be more appropiate in my view

[DomainNameBroker.com]

G gg ggg g unit!

[hysteriaweb]

Unique Visitors should be counted every 24 hours.

[stoned]

I think a unigue visitor is a new "person" Daily, Unforently We can not figure out a "Person" from a "IP Address". I do think a unigue should be counted every 12 hours however.

Matt

[Chelsea]

agree with you

[OgieOgalthorpe]

A unique could be 12 hours, but you have to think about all the AOL users who are constantly getting different IPs.