Re: More accurate web analysis

From: Michael Vilain (vilain_at_spamcop.net)
Date: 10/12/04 

Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 01:01:30 -0700

In article <InGad.43$py.77925@news.uswest.net>,
 "SC" <no_spam@thank.you> wrote:

> I'm trying to more accurately track visitors on one of my sites. Most of
> the visitors are from offices where they share an IP address. So, from one
> IP address, there might be 10 or more individual users. Instead of tracking
> unique IP addresses, I'd like to be able to track:
>
> the number of unique vistors per month
> the number of first time visitors (first time ever) per month
> and then page hits per month for each individual page as well as the site
> total
>
> When it comes to tracking users, the Apache logs seem to track only IP
> addresses so 10 users sharing the same office IP address only seem to
> register as 1 unique visitor. I was using cookies to track individual
> computers, but if the user does not accept the cookie, the counts start to
> go way off.
>
> Hopefully someone has some ideas on how to more accurately count individual
> computers rather than just individual IP addresses.

You don't really have many options here. Apache, as you found, only
logs IP addresses, so you can't really use that metric. However, if you
force people to authenticate with a username and password, you'll be
able to track that unless they share usernames and passwords. If it's
their unique username and there's a company policy against sharing
passwords (make it a termination offense), you'll have what you need.

Since there's no unique way to track users of shared computers, this may
be your only way for a unique users metric. It's up to management to
decide if this is important to them to track this information as they'll
have to enforce rules for you to get it. If they aren't willing to do
this, you have no other way to track unique hits from shared computers. 

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