Is unique visitors same as unique IP's

[Elaine]

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Further to my 'ranting' about Adviva - Louise has just rang to assure me that they were paying £5 per 1000 unique visitors - showing their survy only once per unique user. Their statistics show, on average, 600 UV per day - my stats show over 2000 unique IP's - is this not the same thing? Do I need to look elsewhere for my statistics on unique visitors. Using weblog lite, at the moment, gonna look for a better one when I get the chance.

[watcher]

Elaine,

Depending on the ISP a person uses, they may be allocated the same IP address every time they log into the Internet or a dynamic one. If they are allocated a dynamic one and log into the Internet more than once per day, the same user could have different IP addresses.

Conversely, one IP address could be shared, at different times during the day, by many users.

How are Adviva determining a unique daily visitor - IP addresses, hostnames, cookies or something else ? If they are using IP addresses, their uniquse visitor stats could well be wrong.

[ianm]

Most of the big dial-up providers use a dynamic IP, so as watcher says you can have someone visit your page hang up and reconnect to their ISP and come back to the same page and they will have quite probably have a different IP address.

If your using PHP then you can get the visitor's IP address with this little snippit -

echo "You are visting from IP Address ".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; 

[SillyJokes]

IP does not equal unique user - it used to.

Now I believe all AOL users have the same IP .

Don't use IP addresses to track affiliate click throughs.

[Consultant]

With AOL, one user can actually use up to 15 IP addresses within one session on your site, AOL use a multi-threaded IP allocation system, similar to the way that peer-to-peer file transfer is conducted.

Your stats could show 15 users, with 1 page view.