Most accurate method of tracking unique visitors?

[JeffJ]

What's the most reliable technique? The reason I ask is that some ad networks request this info on their application and I can only begin to guess going by unique IPs. I know the ad networks track unique visitor adviews using cookies but the networks I've worked with so far (VC and Burst) don't provide this info back to the publishers. http://www.very-cool-stuff.com/ubb/frown.gif

My stats show that about 10% of my site's "registered members" have cookies disabled. I have many more visitors than those who bother to register. I can't simply count unique IPs however because a good chunk of my visitors come from AOL proxies (about 25%) and from WebTV (5%). Dialup users with dynamic IPs may visit more than once a day with a different IP in each session.

My server is Apache 1.3.9 and it doesn't have mod_usertrack installed. Does anyone have experience with mod_usertrack? It plants a cookie on each visitor and logs each visitor's clickstream, but the docs on Apache's site were a bit sketchy on the logging it provides. I would expect there would problem for people who don't accept cookies -- I assume the module would count each pageview from a cookie-disabled visitor as a new unique visitor. Are there log analysis tools available for the cookie log that would intelligently weed out the entries from cookie-disabled visitors?

Is going by unique IPs sufficient? Is there an industry-standard percentage to multiply your unique IPs by to get a better actual unique visitor count?

[This message has been edited by JeffJ (edited 11-08-1999).]

[This message has been edited by JeffJ (edited 02-06-2000).]

[fairhousing]

ip addresses is what burst uses, just check ur analog stats. ip's seem to be the best way. although, differ ad networks use differ means.

good luck http://www.very-cool-stuff.com/ubb/wink.gif

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