Unique Visitor Tracking

Most websites incorporate a simple hit counter. A hit counter is a piece of code embedded in a web page which tracks visitors. These simple versions merely tell the web master that someone has visited. Most web pages have hit counters installed, so that the owners can see how popular the site is. Once set up, these counters will be incremented by one every time the web page is accessed in a web browser.

But is using a simple hit counter a true measure of the visitors to your website. If someone visits your web page several times, he is counted as 7 visitors. If someone downloads 5 pieces of information from your site, he is counted as 5 visitors. If a person visits a site a hundred times in a month, he is counted as 100 visitors. What is really needed is a Unique Visitor Tracker.


When tracking the amount of traffic to a Web site, a unique visitor refers to a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time. The Unique Visitor Tracker, which tracks and counts Web site traffic, can distinguish between visitors who only visit the site once and unique visitors who return to the site. Different from a site’s hits or page views — which are measured by the number of files that are requested from a site — unique visitors are measured according to their real unique IP addresses, which are like online fingerprints, and unique visitors are counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site.

If a person visits a site a hundred times in a month, they are still counted as a single unique visitor.

The Unique Visitor Tracker, tracks your visitors based on their real IP address. This is not the same as counting Hits. The difference between a hit and a visit is that a hit is counted each time a page is refreshed. It means if you visit a page 10 times in a single visit, this will count like 10 people visited the page. However, if the user’s IP is tracked and stored into a database, when he refreshes the page, the count will remain the same – because the visitor’s IP already exists in the database. Some people have dynamic IPs, but this is okay since it changes every time they reconnect, which can be once a day or so – the unique count can still be trusted.

Tracking visitors who are unique to your website gives you an idea of the amount of traffic you are receiving to your website. Tracking also provides a data on the performance of your website across the web and its ability to attract new visitors to it.

The unique visitor tracking method is good because it shows a business website how many potential customers they have browsing the site. This number is much more beneficial to a business, as opposed to hits.