Hits Up, Page Views Up, Visits Down - but only in Raw Log

[nmbsailorgirl]

Ok, I am banging my head against any solid object at this point and really could use some expert advice (and even some wild guesses).

Sometime during June we saw a MASSIVE decrease in visits in our raw logs. But Google Analytics happily shows a nice steady increase in visits and uniques as we would expect during tourist season. Our raw logs show increase in hits and pageviews but a 50k decrease in visits but a INCREASE in uniques? I know the decrease in visits is not correct because the average page views almost doubled in raw logs but stayed steady in Google Analytics.

Sample Data May / June
May Hits Raw: 2,253,815 / June Hits: 2,637,011
May Page Views: 818,440 / June Page Views: 905,129
May Visits Raw: 124,136 / June Visits: 72,286
May Uniques Raw: 21,392 / June Uniques: 25,250
Google Visits: 27,975 / Google Visits: 26,979
Google Uniques: 16,205 / Google Uniques: 21,192

Can anyone give me any ideas of what to look for that would cause a 50,000+ decrease in visit counts in the raw logs? Last July we hit our peak at 217,000 visits with just over 2 million hits. Sales staff is about to have a full riot because I can't give them similar numbers! July's hits were over 3 million but showing 74,000 visits. Google Uniques show we have 3 TIMES the uniques than we did last year.

My logs are telling me that people are spending over 11 minutes on my site browsing through 18 pages. Google's is much more reasonable at 1.17 minute browsing through 2.23 pages. As much as I love my website and would like to believe my log stats, I just don't see that as realistic.

Anything, even wild guesses, would be helpful. I have ran the logs through a million different analyzers with similar results.

Things we did about at that time:
- changed navigation structure (might have increased page views)
- added sitemap.xml (finally)
- added some nofollow on duplicate contents (print friendly, etc)

I have also checked with the server guys and since we host other sites on the same box that are not having similar issues, they ruled out a server setting.

Thanks in advance!
<bang head here>

[incrediblehelp]

Maybe you are getting lots of scrapper or spider/bot traffic?>

[cgrantski]

What's a "unique" in your case? Does the site have persistent cookies, transient cookies ... ?

[nmbsailorgirl]

Thanks for the responses. I think we may have identified the culprit - a local ISP seems to have changed their business class setup so that multiple individuals appear to be coming from the same IP.

In direct answer to the questions - we ran reports that totally eliminated as much spider/bot traffic as we could and it showed the same results.

A unique are unique IPs only. I am still looking for software that can analyze my logs and look at user agent and ip to determine a unique. Our website is the homepage for many businesses and even some condo complexes which all appear to come in under the same ip.

If anyone has any suggestions on that, please let me know!