Page loads is the same as Unique hits every day..and more

[needles]

I have a couple of problems with the stats. Not all of them are bugs.

My site is just a few days old so it's easy to find problems with stats. I also record the number of views for each link on one part of my site, so that helps as well.

The problems:
1. ) I'm getting the same amount of hits and uniques every day.

I was getting about 10x more hits than uniques on a counter I was using previously..

I am guessing the page hits stat is correct, while the unique one is incorrect, but in that case the unique one is very low and doesn't seem to be really accurate (compared to my former counter, which was also to low - I checked). I could be wrong of course,

2. ) I got some traffic from a forum the very first day I used this counter. The counter showed almost all of these guys as returning visitors. They couldn't have been returning visitors, and even if they were, how would your program know? I had just installed the counter minutes before. Maybe there's an explanation for this. I dunno.

3. ) The 'Visitor' page is showing every single hit instead of every unique visitor, which means page after page with hits from the same guy. Isn't this section supposed to be about 'visitors' and not about hits?

4. ) The 'Popular' page shows the title of each page, instead of the URL. I'd much prefer if I could see the URL, because I use the same title on every page. An option for that would be nice.

Lastly, great professional page with nice graphs, I would really like to continue using it.

Well firstly you're not allowed change the code that you insert on the webpage as you are breaking are terms and conditions.

Perhaps we should make this a little clearer on the 'install code' page.

The pageloads, unique visitors, returning visitors and first time visitors are all based on a cookie. So if you visitors don't let a cookie be created, then they won't work very well.

I had a look at your stats though, and they don't make any sense. I don't know what went wrong here - I've set your maximum visitor length to an hour (you had it at 24 hours) and I just want to monitor your stats now and see what happens.

[needles]

Ok, cool

Your stats are already starting to look like they are being recorded more sensibly - I wonder what the problem is with setting the visitor length to a full day and not an hour ... maybe we'll just remove that option.

[needles]

Well, counting a new unique for every 24 hrs seems most logical to me, and is pretty much standard for tracking systems. That means you always know rougly how many different people actually visit your site every day.

If you count by the hour, there is no way of knowing how many daily users you actually have. And that's the most important stat, IMO.