Gathering visitor statistics isn't an exact science. Like all statistics, visitor statistics too have an inherent margin of error. The numbers can get distorted, as the following examples illustrate:
- If two people who visit a website are behind the same proxy server, the web server may not recognize them as distinct visitors because both expose the same IP address to the web server.
- If a single person uses an Internet service that doesn't necessarily route separate page requests to the same website through the same proxy server—AOL, for example, the web server may record each page request as coming from a distinct visitor.
- The term visit doesn't have a universally-accepted definition. What constitutes a single visit to a person may appear to be two different visits to a web server. For example, you may get a call from a friend soon after you visit a website. You may chat with your friend for an hour and then go back to your computer and continue from where you left off. From your perspective, you visited the website only once. The site's web server, however, may have stopped keeping track of you after, say, 30 minutes. When you resume your interrupted visit, the server then may record it as a distinct visit.
- Sometimes, web servers record visitors based on a unique cookie that they issue to each visitor. This approach has two advantages: visits by robots are ignored because they don't accept cookies, and multiple visits by the same person can be tracked to get a more accurate count of unique visitors. But this system is not foolproof either. If you visit a site from your work computer as well as from your home computer, the web server may count you as two distinct visitors.
Such distortions tend to even out as the volume of the data increases. It's difficult or even pointless to analyze data that consists of all of five visits, but as the volume grows, you can consider Reports accurate enough for all practical purposes.
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