[WEB4LIB] RE: Reporting Web usage: what numbers do you use?

[Lori Ayre]

More questions pertaining to Karen's dilemma....if a site doesn't want to
place cookies on their visitor's machine and are relying on the visitor's IP
address, how can they reliably track the number of 'unique visitors' to
their website? 

For example, awstats increments the 'unique visitor' count each time an IP
address hits the site but it doesn't increment that counter again until the
minimum VISIT_TIMEOUT is reached which, by default, is set to 10000 seconds
(they call that hour).  

Seems to me that this number isn't very useful because I'm assuming everyone
from the same library is going to hit a site with the same IP address (their
public IP address).  My assumption is that most libraries use a firewall
that performs a NAT process and displays one IP address to the world. 

I'm wondering if my assumption is correct.  *Do* most libraries only use one
public IP address such that whether a staff person or 20 people on your
various public access computers hit a site, it will all look like traffic
from the same ip address?  

And if yes, what's a better way to figure out how many of 'your people' are
visiting a site?

Lori Ayre



-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]
On Behalf Of John Creech
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 3:19 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] RE: Reporting Web usage: what numbers do you use?


On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, K.G. Schneider wrote:

> The other is to generate some discussion about *why* you use what you 
> use. In particular, I have found that statistical packages often have 
> wildly variant rules about what a "user session" is.

One thing folks may want to consider, Karen, (and I think sometimes they 
forget this or don't know it) is that some of these packages are quite 
configurable and you can get a variety of details and snapshots of what 
web servers collect.

John Creech, Systems Librarian
Brooks Library, Central Washington University