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Hits or Misses: Who is Your Website's Audience?
securitas writes "The Christian Science Monitor's Gregory M. Lamb wrote a
story interesting to anyone who runs a website: How do you accurately and reliably measure the audience for your website? From the article: 'Most websites have no idea how many people view their content. This inherent fuzziness is causing problems for commercial websites, especially online publications desperate to make money from Internet advertising... How can you charge for ads when it's nearly impossible to tell advertisers how many people will see them?' The article discusses the flaws and problems with Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix - they grossly undersample workplace users - and the rise in the number of sites requiring user registration."
From the article: 'Most websites have no idea how many people view their content.
They don't employ a unique ID stored within a lightly encrypted cookie, then? Of course, those merely provide a statistic related to the amount of individual computers viewing the Web site, not the amount of people. They obviously fail to account for computers with multiple users, such as household machines and public terminals.
Do you like German cars?
Most hosting services come with tracking tools. My host has tools that will even break down IPs to general locations, I believe. It has so many options that it gets difficult to use. So, if you have a good host, you should be able to find out who uses your site w/o any additional work.
If not, as most have said, set a cookie with a tracking ID. Basically, if you make a website without a decent hit counter (when you need one), you're not much of a web designer / developer. I usually log IPs, user agents, and dates, even though I never look at them. Just in case.