Problem is i think it can be pretty inaccurate, but not because some people mistake a pageview for a visit like what some people mentioned, but because people use different stats programs to get there stats from
I think the stats would be alot lower if there was a poll but people only used google analytics for there stats.
I find google analytics and opentracker(which i pay for) give me almost the same accurate results, but all the host provider stats like “Webalizer” & “Awstats” give way too high inflated figures to the multiple of up to 10.
Do any of you find its the same with your sites ?
The unique visitors metric reported by Google Analytics is, in my opinion, flawed.
When I develop my sites, I include a Site Log feature. Every time a page is viewed, I add a record of the user’s IP, browser, the referring page, etc. to a table in my database. I can then easily run reports on this data to calculate page views, unique visitors, top referrers, etc.
The numbers reported by Google Analytics are roughly 1/2 (and sometimes even worse than that) of what the raw data I collect suggests.