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Counting Visitors ...

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Counting Visitors ... Search Engine Optimization forum discussing related topics such as Google, PageRank, Link Exchange, and Link Popularity. Improve your ranking in the Search Engines by employing good optimization techniques.

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  #1  
Old March 5th, 2008, 02:59 PM
jaeSun jaeSun is offline
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Counting Visitors ...
Not sure this is the right forum.

Say I have this scenario.

Option 1:
I am a visitor. I visit a website. I am then counted as a visit to the site. But I leave the site to go to another website. 30 minutes later, I return to the site. But I am not counted as a new visit.

Option 2:
I am a visitor. I visit a website. I am then counted as a visit to the site. But I leave the site to go to another website. But 31 minutes later, I return to the site. But i AM counted as a new visit.

On the site that I am, the server configuration is set to a certain threshold to determine if a returning visitor gets counted as a new visit. (in the above case, <= 30 minutes).

My question, how do other websites count visitors, in terms of determining when a visit is a new visit even if they may have visited before (if this makes sense)? is 30 minutes a good threshold to use? Too little or too long?

how do other analytics companies track and determine (if they do)? Google, Yahoo, etc ?
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Old March 6th, 2008, 01:18 PM
Loyola05 Loyola05 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jaeSun
My question, how do other websites count visitors, in terms of determining when a visit is a new visit even if they may have visited before (if this makes sense)? is 30 minutes a good threshold to use? Too little or too long?

how do other analytics companies track and determine (if they do)? Google, Yahoo, etc ?


Browser cookies are one way. IP logging is another. There's probably other ways too, but the bottom line is that it's done pretty easily (though not perfectly).

As for timing... it depends on how you're being tracked. Cookies have expiration times which can be different on every site. If your IP address is being tracked, then I suppose timing isn't an issue.
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Old March 6th, 2008, 01:35 PM
ae36 ae36 is offline
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In the analytics tools that I have experience with 20 - 30 minutes is the general rule for session expiration.
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Old March 8th, 2008, 02:31 PM
seo_marketing seo_marketing is offline
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It could be related to cookies settings. Certain computers are behind firewalls which do not allow cookies to be stored.

This could be the reason behind unusual pattern in analytics
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Old March 13th, 2008, 08:39 PM
morph07 morph07 is offline
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in your OPTION 1.. these cases were often done when a site using SESSION(PHP script) and COOKIES... they count it by the uniqueness of their COOKIE values... and expiration time of the COOKIES seems working in this scenario.. also IP tracking might working too. There's actually many scenario regarding monitoring visitors..

in your OPTION 2.. they must only calculate the Page Load of their site like in statcounter...
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