Hi

Yes, we have recently changed the way we evaluate your amount of unique visitors. You can track a unique visitor either with cookies or IP address. Neither are 100% accurate, so a combination of the two is what works the best. Our live tracking is done with cookies and every night at 24:00 Central time the stats are corrected (IP/Cookie combo) to reflect the real unique visitor amount. Most people will see a decrease in unique visitors when this happens. Sites with many pageviews per visitor will see a significant decrease.

Why did we do this? Two reasons:

1. More people are disallowing cookies (Personal firewalls etc.)
2. We have had quite a lot of cheaters lately and our new stats are virtually cheat safe.


The following factors have to be taken into consideration when determining why there is a difference between your stats and the stats on our site:

1. If our code is on a page, unique visitors will get counted. Our stats servers are not busy.

2. Defintion of a unique visitor varries greatly between stat programs. Some reclaim a visitor as new unique if he has been away for 20min, 2hours etc. We first reclaim them after 24 hours.

3. Only pages with our code are taken into consideration. If using log stats all your pages are taken into consideration.

4. We don't consider spiders/search engines as unique visitors. We don't filter all spiders, but most of the ones we don't filter will not show as a visitor either since they don't bother loading the code/gif from our site. There are also a variety of programs out there set up to generate "false" traffic, which we don't consider real visitors.

5. We feel that our stats now are as close to reallity as you can get. More importantly everybody is counted the same way, so it is fair. The stats before were unfair since they favored sites with high repeat visitor rate.


You are more than welcome to send us your log files from a couple of days, so we can take a look to see if we can determine why you are showing a different picture.