At 08:14 PM 9/3/98 -0400, Eric Poole wrote:
>
>Others say that a "unique visitor" (or "user session" or whatever term you
>want to use) means every unique IP or host that visited any time during
>that day (and what is a day? the period from midnight to midnight? any
>24-hour period? etc...).
You see it less frequently these days, but host/IP based checking is not
always enough to identify visitors because those browsing from multi-user
systems (mainframes, development servers, etc) will all come as the same IP
even though they are distinct sessions. The more modern version of that
problem is proxy servers, where everyone sitting behind a corporate
firewall might show up as the same gateway IP.
>The very fact that the Webtrends "no activity" time can be customized
>means no one at Webtrends really knows what it should be and they're
>making it up as they go along, just like everybody else does.
Don't knock it till you've tried it. WebTrends can nail it down a bit
better than you expect since they have a session tracking module that can
be attached to the Web server itself to generate a unique cookie for each
visitor. They are not simply watching IP addresses. The "no activity"
setting is there just to tweak what you might consider as a "single,
contiguous session".
--bill
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