Stephen Turner wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Jim Sander wrote:
>
> > > In the doc it mentions that cookies are not a reliable way to count visitors.
> > > But is there any reason that number of unique session cookies won't give me
> > > a minimum number of unique visitors?
> >
> > It's quite possible that somone could "force" cookies to you- the
> > browser has complete control over them after all. They could simply figure
> > out what a session-id looks like and set up a robot to hit your site and
> > throw bogus cookies out. It's not reliable in that it can be faked out.
> >
>
> I'm not sure that's ALL that likely. But the following are very likely:
> 1) People refuse cookies. Unless you won't let them into your site (which
> is also arguably skewing your statistics) you will not count them
> properly.
You could compare total requests from "users" to total requests to be able to tell
your advertising clients (or whoever cares about your session stats) how many
non-session requests you've had (or percent of requests that are
non-session/non-cookie).
> 2) People clear out their cookie cache. (jar??)
In the case of Session cookies, this doesn't apply. Session cookies are only stored
for the session and expire as soon as the user ends that session (from the browser's
perspective). That does mean that someone couldn't be searching on your site.
Disconnect to make a phone call and then go back to searching and this would be
counted as two sessions, and there are other problems with these assumptions, but
most market statistics are less accurate than even this.
--
Jeremy Wadsack
OutQuest Magazine
a Wadsack-Allen publication
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