Option to not count visits if cookies are disabled

[guillermo]

I was reading the Knowledge Base and saw this:

If a visitor does not have cookies enabled are they still tracked by the system?
Yes! Absolutely the visitors are still tracked. They will be considered a unique visitor to your website on each page load but they will still be tracked.

I think it would be a good idea to have an option that if a user has cookies disabled, they don’t get counted as unique visitors or sessions. Just the page views get counted. I think this way would be more accurate since it keeps tracks of only those users that have the StatCounter cookie. Those who don’t, are not counted since there is no exact way to know if that is a actual user or just a robot scanning your site with JS/Images enabled.

[guillermo]

I saw this someplace else about Metrics and IAB.net standardization:
[...]the sessions and the unique visitors according to the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) standardization, described in the Metrics and Methodology document by The Media Measurement Task Force, September 15, 1997. This calculation is made by using the cookies method, in which introduces a cookie in the user's computer to identify his/her browser. The system measures the amount of page views whether the browser accepts cookies or not. On the other hand, the document is clear in pointing out that the users who don't have active cookies won't be counted in sessions nor as unique visitors.

[webado]

I don't know, it sounds like you want to replace one kind of inconclusive with another kind of inconclusive.

[guillermo]

I think that it would make more accurate results if it only log as visits those who have cookies enabled. For example, I did a test and browsed my site with cookies disabled. I browsed 30 pages. I got counted as 30 unique visitors and 30 first time visitors (for me alone). I'm sure most spiders, site scanners, etc are browsing my site JS enabled, but cookie disabled, and they are counted as a visitor for each page load, which is not good. But with this "option" that can be prevented.

[webado]

Majprity of bots and spdiers are both javascript disabled and image disabled, so they never get logged by Statcounter.

Any spiders, that may get logged at all, would travel javascript disabled but image enabled. Yes, there are some very few bots that run javascript enabled as well.

Naturally I'd think bots and spdiers would not have cookies enabled either.

Mostly what you'll find in your log are actual human visitors who disable cookies, either in general or third party cookies as Statcounter's are. They may also disable javascript, especially if they use browsers like Firefox - it's a cultural thing :wink:

As I said, neither counting nor ignoring visitors with cookies disabled produces realistic results. Adifferent method might. I would opt for keeping tabs only by IP address. The visitors that mess all this up are AOL users, but they would mess it up no matter whether cookies are enabled or not. I think it's a lesser evil all in all.