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As mentioned in the previous post, a unique visitor is a unique “person” who went to your visit your site. A unique person is considered unique, so long as the computer that he is using is unique too. Here I’ll compare unique visitors vs visit count, as well as awstats in Cpanel and Google analytics.

Let’s go deeper into defining a unique visitor.

If your IP address is static

A unique visitor’s with his PC’s IP address unique, will only register itself on your site’s unique visitor count as 1 hit/day only.

On the first day, if the same guy keeps surfing to your site, closes his browser, and opens your site again, it is considered as 1 hit, no matter how many times he does that. On the visit count, it will appear many times, because that is what the visit counts are registering.

On the second day, if he surfs to your site, he registers 2 unique visitor count on your site. This is because it’s a new day so everything else is reset. buy viagra viagra online With Google analytics, this is considered loyalty, or in other words a returning visitor.

If you are using awstats in Cpanel, you’ll see a big number in unique visitors and number of visits, due to the logging of IP addresses that “touched” the server. But under Google analytics, because it uses Cookies to measure visits, it may not register that second day unique visitor count, as it registers by the cookie information stored on the user’s browser.

If your IP address is dynamic

Most of us here uses dial-up, or dynamic IP adddress. Even if yours is static, it might change once a while say few days to a few months, depending on your ISP.

On the first day, this results in the same as if your are in static IP. Your site registers your visit as 1 count.

On the second day, if your IP changes, it is certain that it registers it as another unique visitor. Basically since most users are on DHCP and if they reboot their machines everyday, you are certainly guaranteed a unique visit.

If you are using awstats in Cpanel, you’ll see an even bigger number count in unique visitors and number of visits. But under Google analytics, because it uses Cookies to measure visits, it will register that second day unique visitor count, but it will be called as a Unique visitor but not New Visits.

Cpanel Awstats vs Google Analytics

When you use 2 different browsers on a single computer, it will result as 2 hits, because the cookies are kept in each separate browser.

Therefore, if you compare the 2 web traffic analytics software, you’ll realise that the number generated by Cpanel Awstats is always greater than that of Google Analytics, in terms of both visits and uniques.

Cpanel Awstats = Logs
Google Analytics = Cookies

By comparing the way both software tracks, they are equally fair in each of them. So I suggest you take the mean of the two, and use that as an “average” unique visitor count.

Happy analyzing !