Help Measuring 'Total' Visitor Numbers

Inclusive of 'Uniques', 'Repeats' and 'First Time Ever'

[markd]

Hi all

I wonder if you could offer us some advice on a problem we are having measuring a 'total' number of visits to a site.

Currently, we are using a 'tagged'system - adding Javascript to the web page which sends info on a 'real time' basis to a server. It's OK on most things, but doesn't seem able to give us a 'total' number of visitors for a given time frame, say a month.

So what we get is:

Unique Visitors - those who have visited for the first time in that month

New Visitors - those who have come to the site for the first time ever.

But what it doesn't seem to log is any subsequent (repeat) visits by those who may have come back after their first (Unique) visit in that month.

The implications of this are that if a site gets 100 Unique Visitors in a month, and those visitors come back 10 times during the same month, approx. 1000 'repeat visits' are not logged at all. Obviously, this makes a 'total visitor' number impossible to measure.

Is this inherent in all 'tagged' based stats programs? I can sticky anyone to tell them what package we are using in case we are misinterpreting the stats - but I don't think we are.

I know that Web Trends 'on demand' package can break visitors down in this way, but it's really expensive, so any other recommendations are welcome.

Hope you may be able to help.

[markd]

Thought I would bump this one in case anybody could help - any advice/thoughts welcomed.

Thanks

[larryhatch]

If you are writing the javascript yourself, it should be simple.
You need a third register for "total visits". Call the variable totvisits say.

Make ALL visits increment totvisits FIRST ( i.e. totvisits++; ).
Make sure you only count calls to pages (.html or whatever), NOT to images.

Only THEN, do you continue to your existing routine to see if the person visited before etc.
incrementing those counts if not.

If you do it backwards, you might loop out of the totvisits++; without incrementing. -Larry

[markd]

Thanks Larry

Unfortunately, we're not - it's a product from a company. Although I will pass this onto them. I am wondering if anybody else has encountered this problem with 'tagged' stats?

[larryhatch]

I'm amazed any tracking program/product would not count total visitors properly. -Larry

[markd]

I must admit, we were surprised also. Ironically, the rest of the package is fine - it's just this issue of measuring 'total visitors'.

I am reluctant to say that the Tech Support is very poor. Just to try to get to the bottom of this and find a solution, I have phoned the US from UK four times as well as numerous emails outlining the problem and I am still waiting for a response.