I don’t think it’s worth it to spend too much time chasing accurate visitor counts. As the internet is stateless, the definition of a visitor is subjective. Do you wait 20 minutes and count all page views within that timeframe by the same cookie as one visit? Or do you wait 35 minutes? Or do you only wait 10 minutes?

The important thing to note I think, is that visitor stats are relative tools. So if you use tool A (e.g. Statpress) consistently, you can say well on day 1 Statpress said I had 3 visitors and on day 20 Statpress said I had 50 visitors and on day 99 Statpress said I had 300 visitors. And unless you changed the options in Statpress in between (so it counts different types of visit as a visit), you can say your visitor count has improved.

I also use the Wordpress Plugin All In One SEO Pack. That places Google Analytics easily onto your Wordpress blog. So you get a more informed view of your stats, albeit with a time delay.

Lizzy

Thanks a lot for the clarification. I’m using StatPress in WordPress for my game development blog. From your sidebar, I see that you also use StatPress. Have you found the StatPress plugin to provide accurate Visitor and PageView counts?

By the way, since a single person who visits in multiple sessions counts as multiple “visitors,” this statistic should really be called “visitations.” Can you please change the Internet vernacular on this? Thanks!

– NEB

Very useful information on the number of visitors\page views. As a person managing my own blog I find your post very informative. Thanks.

- Anitha

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Even if you visit via an ISP who uses a differnet IP address every time you visit, a visitor cannot normally be determined via IP address. If they were, then people on shared IP addresses would always count as the same visitor and make a nonsense of any form of visitor count.

Really, counting instances of IP address only determines one thing and that is how many IP addresses were used to visit a site. This is only interesting if IP address is what interests you. And sometimes it does - like when trying to determine which countries people come from (although this is not always very reliable).

Visits are quite different. They are normally defined as a number of page views from the same source (computer) in a given time period - usually around 20 minutes. This is determined by cookie and so has nothing whatsoever to do with IP address.

Liz