How google analytics and conventional cookie tracking techniques overestimate unique visitors

  • Authors:

  • Max I. Fomitchev

  • Affiliations:

  • Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We report the results of the analysis of website traffic logs and argue that both unique IP address and cookies vastly overestimate unique visitors, e.g. by factor of 8 in our studies. Google Analytics 'absolute unique visitors' measure is shown to produce similar 6x overestimation. To address the problem we present a new model for relating unique visitors to IP address or cookies.