What do you consider a "unique" visitor? Do you know how popular software (web log analyzers, 3rd party stats services) determine this?
I'm taking a look at how accurate various means of logging stats for websites are. In a test I ran yesterday (looking at the data today), using a cookie to identify each visitor resulted in 944 "unique" visits to one of my sites, from only 592 IP addresses. Clearly there's some reason this is very inaccurate, whether people are simply not accepting cookies or are deleting them in less than a 24 hour period.
Do other programs/services simply count the distinct IP addresses during a day and call that unique visits? What about people surfing behind proxies, such as some Chinese traffic, some AOL traffic, some MSN traffic?
Any ideas on the most accurate way to go about this?