How are visitor statistics tracked in the short and long term?
Friday, 21 September 2007 12:30 PM
IASP 5.0's visitor tracking system uses short-lived
cookies to track visitor activity.
When a visitor first visits your website, a cookie is given to the user's browser for future use. If the visitor does not view any other page on your website within one hour, the cookie is discarded and the visit is not included in your statistics: this is standard industry practice. Single page visits such as these are referred to as 'bounces', and excluding single-page visits also excludes cases where, for example, you may have your own website set as your homepage, and aren't really 'visiting' it except as a side-effect of starting your browser.
Using cookies to track visitors has the effect of weeding out non-visitors such as search engine spiders, spam bots, and other automated non-human traffic.
This means that, if anything, your visit count is a slight under-estimate of the total visitor traffic, but is limited to genuine site visitors only.
Long-term tracking of visitors across different days rather than single visits raises some privacy concerns and may violate the terms of use and/or privacy policy on many websites. We have, however, tested longer-term tracking functionality (to separate repeat visitors from one-time visitors) internally and may introduce this feature as an option in the future, however naturally revisions to your site's privacy policy may be required.
If you have any further questions about IASP's inbuilt website statistics, please contact us for further information via your Control Panel.
When a visitor first visits your website, a cookie is given to the user's browser for future use. If the visitor does not view any other page on your website within one hour, the cookie is discarded and the visit is not included in your statistics: this is standard industry practice. Single page visits such as these are referred to as 'bounces', and excluding single-page visits also excludes cases where, for example, you may have your own website set as your homepage, and aren't really 'visiting' it except as a side-effect of starting your browser.
Using cookies to track visitors has the effect of weeding out non-visitors such as search engine spiders, spam bots, and other automated non-human traffic.
This means that, if anything, your visit count is a slight under-estimate of the total visitor traffic, but is limited to genuine site visitors only.
Long-term tracking of visitors across different days rather than single visits raises some privacy concerns and may violate the terms of use and/or privacy policy on many websites. We have, however, tested longer-term tracking functionality (to separate repeat visitors from one-time visitors) internally and may introduce this feature as an option in the future, however naturally revisions to your site's privacy policy may be required.
If you have any further questions about IASP's inbuilt website statistics, please contact us for further information via your Control Panel.
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