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I am using a program called openwebscope to track site use.
I am using a counter as well to track home page hits. Generally the counts recorded by my home page counter have been close in number to the unique hits recorded on the server web log stats. Yesterday the unique hits were out by a large number.
Can someone educate me on what the server is logging as a unique hit. Any ideas what could cause the discrepency in numbers. On the day in question there were a lot of hits shown from this computer cache-rr04.proxy.aol.com but the "rr04" portion was different. Would this indicate one person spent a lot of time coming back and forth to the site.
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To answer your question about cache-rr04.proxy.aol.com, it's merely a proxy server. Therefore many AOL customers could have been visiting your site, and it would show up the same.
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What I was wondering was does the proxy server change while someone is surfing your site or does it only change for the user when they log off and start surfing again.
I am still trying to find out what defines a unique hit.
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The only time the IP would change is if the visitor disconnected from his ISP and then reconnected thereto.
And this is only the case if the ISP dynamically assigns the user's IP upon connection to their service.
In many cases -- certain cable services, larger proxied ISP's, dedicated DSL's, many older ISP's, etc. -- a user's IP's may actually be static; or, at least, appear so in your logs since you may be seeing only the proxy.
This has rather interesting implications for pay-per-impression ad revenues, by the way; where you may have hundreds or thousands of visitors behind the same proxy.
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Unique hits are usually defined as a unique IP per X period of time (usually 24 hours). So, if I visit yoru home page and hit reload 12 times, it's still 1 unique hit. But the server will log each hit as an new hit. Advertisers and advertising companies are more interested in the unique hits rather than all hits.
I hope this helps a bit.
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Wazeh...
That's an important factor I neglected to mention above -- per unit time -- especially in concern with traffic as measured by impression advertisers.
Ad providers typically clock unique hits against a 24-hour period.
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Thanks guys that is good info.
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Then, of course, there's the other definition of a Unique Hit.
For instance, when a transvestite Moldavian goatherder with one eye, a limp, a lifetime subscription to GQ, and an enormous monkey on his left arm hits your site?
That's a Unique Hit, too.
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Reminds me of that Do You Yahoo! ad..... :D
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Why, thank you, Chicken...