I'm not sure about his article and his formula, but it is already a debate in the web analytics industry.
http://www.omniture.com/blog/
Even using cookies it's nearly impossible to get correct unique visitor counts and that is why the industry is moving more towards unique visits, because a visit is a visit, it doesn't matter who the visitor was...
The only way to really measure how far off visitor data could be is comparing unique customers (cusomter id) to the number of unique visitors they create (the customer id coming from a login). That way they could see the affects of multiple customers on multiple machines and browsers and also see the affects of multiple customers on a single machine and browser.
I had the same thing happen to me. I was sooooo pissed off because I had considered buying the domain custombots.com at godaddy (added to cart) and stargate.com (added to cart). I came back the next day to purchase and it was taken. I talked to the stargate guys on web chat and spoke with their VP of sales. He swore up and down that they did not do that. And conjectured that maybe Verisign was selling the queries, because that is ultimately where the queries go. I didn't talk to the godaddy people, but it is possible that they are farming the domains not bought and selling the list to potential buyers. I added to cart on Novemeber 14th and it was gone on November 15th 2005.
I checked on cusotmbots.com on the 15th of November and it was purchased by some company in Panama. Looks like since then it has been sold to someone else on March 1. Pisses me off!
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I'm not sure about his article and his formula, but it is already a debate in the web analytics industry. http://www.omniture.com/blog/ Even using cookies it's nearly impossible to get correct unique visitor counts and that is why the industry is moving more towards unique visits, because a visit is a visit, it doesn't matter who the visitor was... The only way to really measure how far off visitor data could be is comparing unique customers (cusomter id) to the number of unique visitors they create (the customer id coming from a login). That way they could see the affects of multiple customers on multiple machines and browsers and also see the affects of multiple customers on a single machine and browser.
I had the same thing happen to me. I was sooooo pissed off because I had considered buying the domain custombots.com at godaddy (added to cart) and stargate.com (added to cart). I came back the next day to purchase and it was taken. I talked to the stargate guys on web chat and spoke with their VP of sales. He swore up and down that they did not do that. And conjectured that maybe Verisign was selling the queries, because that is ultimately where the queries go. I didn't talk to the godaddy people, but it is possible that they are farming the domains not bought and selling the list to potential buyers. I added to cart on Novemeber 14th and it was gone on November 15th 2005.
I checked on cusotmbots.com on the 15th of November and it was purchased by some company in Panama. Looks like since then it has been sold to someone else on March 1. Pisses me off!