MrMcGee wrote:
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.
Are you taking into account spider views? I find that if I were to detect spiders by IP (and even then I am missing some), a lot of ‘uniques’ drop out. Maybe Google Analytics takes account of this?