AOL Refers Skewing Rankings

Anyone else notice this?

[CyberSpaced]

The way my stats program counts, every time someone comes from AOL it counts it as a new session. This is great for increasing the number of sessions, but is killing my per-session page views... It seems like every request is from a different prozy, but I can follow the track of the surfer to see it's the same person...

It's kind of hard to sell ad space with lower page-per-session numbers... Has anyone else come across this problem?

[Brett_Tabke]

Study some of the java script banner code from DoubleClick, Engage/flycast, and Burst. They use a tracking code, but also a random number generation. That way, the code is executed on the client computer, generating a random string, causing aol to request the real page and sending the random string and the tracking code back to the site. Toss out the random number, and you've got your session code.

[CyberSpaced]

Actually, my problem lies in the fact that every stat my server collects is fine except for the pv/session... I'm trying to sell more advertising space on my web sites and advertisers like higher numbers of page views per user... It's not outside advertising I'm worried about...

My problem lies in the fact that ever AOL hit to my server counts as a distinct session. Every file, every page... they all come from a seperate proxy server... So they skew my per session numbers drastically. If an AOL surfer goes to 80 pages on my site at an average of 2 hits per page, that's 160 1-hit sessions... It drags the average down greatly... I was just wondering if anyone else had this problem so I could A) get a new stats program or B) talk to my host about the issue...

Thanks...