How does Enhance calculate visits?

PradeepC

@Adam, We are looking to have our plans around the visitor limit. Could you tell how Enhance calculates visits which we see in the plan settings page?

adil

I think they are inaccurate or depends on requests and not actual visits.

Adam

Yes exactly, it comes from the web server access log. It's an indication of actual traffic the server is handling which is more relevant from a web hosting perspective.

PradeepC

Is there any way to calculate it accurately?

twest

PradeepC the enhance stats should be as accurate as you can get. It's including all requests, not filtering out bots or spam traffic like Google Analytics would do.

JohnB

PradeepC Group by IP and time. Ie 10 requests by the same IP in the same second is just loading assets on the page and should count as 1 hit. Bot detection and blocking could be handled by a WAF.

Look into Self-hosted web analytics. Lots of open source options although it wouldn't show up in the enhance panel anywhere.

Or limit based on data transfer as that's the real cost.

Adam

twest the enhance stats should be as accurate as you can get. It's including all requests, not filtering out bots or spam traffic like Google Analytics would do.

The "unique" value filters out known bots but a lot of bots disguise their user agent as a browser. Javascript analytics such as Google Analytics can detect this but there is no way a web log parser will be able to do this.

After filtering out bots, we take a hash of the user agent + IP to determine whether a visitor is a "unique". This isn't perfect but it's similar to the way other web log parsers function.

The Enhance traffic stats are better than GA for tracking periods of peak server load and for measuring comparative website traffic but for visitor tracking you're better off using something with a Javascript embed.

PradeepC

Thanks @twest and @JohnB.
One thing that I saw was I set the plan limits for 1 visit limit, but the website still is live without any issues even after 48 hours and several visits.
@Adam, could you please let me know how the visits in plan limit work?

prasad0889

Hi @Adam, We would also like to know how visits work when defined in package limits. Like will the website show some error, or will the package be suspended?