Tracking AOL users

Getting around the problem of AOL IPs...

[starhiker]

I know this is a subject that has surfaced many times, but I need some feedback on this... I am making a PHP program that track users by IP, but was made aware that AOL uses changing IPs, so an AOL user could have XXX.XXX.XXX.127 one moment and XXX.XXX.XXX.47 the next. What I need to know is; is this the only part that changes? If so, then saving only the three frst bytes of the IP will be enough, especially if I use IP tracking AND session cookies... Any thoughts?

[mack]

This does not only refer to AOL users. Many isp's do a very similar thing by issueing a dynamic ip address. This will be the case for almost all dial up users as well.

Mack.

[doublespeak]

AOL's IP issue is different from general dynamic IPs in that AOL's proxy can even assign a different IP for each request - so a viewer looking at a web page can create many different IPs in logs, one for the HTML, one for the images, etc etc. As they travel from page to page this can cause major problems for IP-based trackers.

The simplest way of overcoming this is with cookies. If you have a visitor ID cookie, your only problem is AOL/similar users with cookies disabled. In this instance you may want to look at analysing the other known factors of a visitor's connection and creating some kind of checksum out of them, so you can eliminate the inaccuracies as much as possible.

[mack]

I don't think tracking with ip addresses alone can truely be effective because of the many isp's who do not provide or alocate static ip addresses. Session id's can be effective but you may encounter various problems with search engine spiders being granted a session. Cookies also works well but again not all users accept cookies.

Mack.

[peterdouglas]

I just made a website that so far only the client and I have viewed. He's got AOL and lives in Detroit, MI but he shows up as coming from either Virginia or New York, NY on AOL.

Anyone know what the approximate percentage of web surfers using AOL might be?

[JAB Creations]

Here is a good question, if you connect via AOhell but use a non-ie browser (such as aol) will your ip change in an access log?

[doublespeak]

I believe the IP will still change since it's a proxy at AOL's end which handles http requests, although I wouldn't want to be quoted on that ;)

[fiu88]

I went through this while tracking click fraud...aol blocks make individuals unidentifibale...you need to cookie the machine to identify indivduals....even then , you'll never know where they're really located...

[ogletree]

This may be a little off topic but another problem with AOL is that if you geotarget with adwords your ads will not show up on aol's searh page. Even if you try to just show ads to people in Virgina. Geotargeting in ANY way will stop all ads on aol.com.

[fiu88]

WE dont EVER want to stop AOL traffic...Aol users are THE best customers...bar none!

[peterdouglas]

I've heard people say that AOL users are great customers... how's that?

[Alternative Future]

If for example you have an AOL user visiting your site, and they view several pages which can create up to several differant IP's then the stats program you use would report this as unique visits Yeah?

-George

[sem4u]

I believe so George. You can get loads of vistors from Reston, Virginia as well...

[Alternative Future]

Thanks for taking the timeout to answer sem4u.

[ogletree]

AOL users rock. The reason I found out about the adwords problem is that I was trying to find a way to get my adwords to just show up on aol only. They buy stuff.