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> The concept of a “visit” is key to this approach. Rather than count unique IP addresses, which would require storing state about what each visitor does, we ca
by zaroth 6y ago
> The concept of a “visit” is key to this approach. Rather than count unique IP addresses, which would require storing state about what each visitor does, we can simply count the number of page views that come from a different site. This provides a perfectly usable metric that doesn’t compromise on privacy.
Say that again please? Is this tracking unique Referrer’s? What if a significant amount of traffic is direct?
- stingraycharles 6y agoAlso I thought browsers didn’t browser a referer for https?
- tonyhb 6y agoAssuming here we mean individual "sessions", eg. session cookies which are removed after you navigate away from the site. Will have to read their JS to see what they're doing.
- baggy_trough 6y agoSession cookies don't have to do with whether you stay on the site or not. They are tied to browser processes.
- tonyhb 6y agoTIL, thanks!
- lucb1e 6y agoJust hit F12 and check in the network tab what is sent on both XHR and navigation. It does send the referer in general.
- severak_cz 6y agousing referrer to detetect unique visits is standard trick of those privacy-oriented analytics services (plausible.io, Simple Analytics). I also do it in my own counter script - https://tildegit.org/severak/millions/src/branch/master/millions_v1.js#L40 https://tildegit.org/severak/millions/src/branch/master/mill...
- bob33212 6y agoA combination of timestamp and referrer becomes the "Unique" ID instead of IP or Cookie.
- baggy_trough 6y agoYes, that explanation is a little bit baffling. Referrers are not very reliable (increasingly missing). Maybe visits will just not be very accurate with this.
- lucb1e 6y agoCitation on "increasingly missing" please. I tried finding out more about that for security reasons (a customer of ours checks the referer for anti-CSRF purposes and it seems to work perfectly fine in any browser so long as you don't do something like https->http posting) but from what I saw it was actually quite reliable and add-ons that block it are rather rare even among privacy what privacy nuts generally recommend to install.
- baggy_trough 6y agoPerhaps I'm thinking of the page part of the referrer URL. If the domain is reliably sent, that's good as far as it goes.
- thefreeman 6y agoI would assume a direct access with no referrer is also considered a "visit". I think the main point here is subsequent clicks around the site with the referrer from the current site do not increment the "visit" counter.