Counting unique webpage visitors

I like stats. You don’t know what you do not measure, right? Or, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, as Peter Drucker said.

Since SEO is probably dead, I just enjoy a good website statistic for my personal consumption. Call it curiosity, or whatever. I call it a walk down memory lane, to the bottom of the hill into the Internet of Old, where hit counters were the thing to have at the bottom of your page(s). Along with those annoying animated web buttons - these things. The buttons are making a solid comeback, like vinyl, so why not hit counters?

I’m pro-privacy (online and off). However, what I understand is how the Internet works and how the IP address is logged and tracked by…everything on the Internet. When I visit a site — any site — I wouldn’t know if they have Google Analytics, Webalizer or AWStats enabled, tracking my every click, page visit and time spent on each page. So, I always assume yes. If not, their server (connected to the network) is definitely logging my visit in the raw logs. It’s just how the damn thing works, the Internet. You visit them via a VPN? That VPN IP address with location as Timbuktu gets logged and tracked.

If you are reading these very words on this website, I can tell you now that I see you. I have both Webalizer and AWStats enabled as well as access to my host’s raw server logs for my domain. All part of the package, bruv! There is no escape, because all your IP are belong to us.

Back in the day, there was no concern about crawler bots and AI scrapers spoiling all the fun, boo-hoo! Looking into Webalizer and AWStats for this domain today, apparently I’m doing rather well. So many IPs have “visited” but when I dig deeper, like looking into time spent on-page, those numbers start to look a little fictitious. Because they are mostly crawlers, noise. The only way these overall “visitors” numbers could be 100% accurate is if we were still in 1997, before Google was founded. But we are not, so it’s all fake news.

On-page hit counters

Surely with all my access to Webalizer, AWStats and server logs, I could satisfy my curiosity there? I mean, all the data is there, so why reinvent the wheel? Is it not simply a case of sifting through the data and grabbing what I’m curious to see?

Well, in my case, yes and no. See, despite all my bragging about having the full package (bruv), I only have the very basic versions of Webalizer and AWStats with all the pretty graphs and very general statistics. They want you to pay for the full works which actually does the analytics for you. To be fair, AWStats is far more granular than Webalizer but still, I do not have a usable view of unique visitors per page, which is what I am looking for.

I therefore have done the Cybrkyd thing and made my own, real old school-like. Take a look at my PHP hit counter.