Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is talking about how people today are able to make money off their blogging but should this be our only motive to blog. La Shawn Barber follows this with her take on the subject. La Shawn discloses that she is "averaging a little over 4,000 unique visitors per day" while Reynolds averages 144,000.

Unique visitors seems to be the statistic to follow, although many will quote their visitor statistic. Can anyone clarify for us the difference?

Laurie Bluedorn

Trivium Pursuit 

Comments

The difference

8:15 PM, Feb. 16, 2006, posted by Anonymous

As I understand it, if I come visit your site, and Alice in Anaheim and Betty from Butffalo and Tia from Timbuktu come visit your site, that's four unique vistors.
If I each of us visit your site three times, that's 12 visitors, but only four *unique* visitors. But that's just my best guess based on the terms and looking at my own stats (where I get 400-500 unique visitors a day)
DeputyHeadmistress
The Common Room
http://heartkeepercommonroom.blogspot.com

Untitled Comment

8:29 PM, Feb. 16, 2006, posted by Anonymous

All my advertisers seem to care about are the number of pageviews or hits that their ad will receive. On the other hand, I like to track how many uniques, plus how many hits I receive. It's fun to see that some people are visiting your blog multiple times during the day. :)

Does anyone know of a good program to recommend to track this more efficiently? I use SiteMeter and the tracking system through my hosting, but I'd like to find a bit more accurate tracking system, if there is one out there.

-Crystal Paine

Untitled Comment

9:51 PM, Feb. 16, 2006, posted by TC

Crystal - I like StatCounter.com a lot better than Site Meter.

Unique visitors

12:38 AM, Feb. 17, 2006, posted by GogoMama

Sounds like they're pretty special! :-) If I visit your page three times in a day, your visitor count will go up 3. Your unique visitor count will only go up 1. Unique visits are logged by ISP. Most stat counters will also discount spiders, leaving them out of the unique visits.

I hadn't thought too much about blogging bringing up the webpage stats. Hmmmm...

Site5

12:40 AM, Feb. 17, 2006, posted by GogoMama

We're hosted on Site5.com. They have great tracking stats that come with the hosting. We've only been with them a couple of months and are constantly amazed at their incredibly wonderful level of customer service (and low prices).