Understanding Pageview and Unique Visitor Metrics in Eden

It is important to understand how Eden calculates pageviews and unique visitors for your Eden website. Because these terms are commonly used to refer to a variety of different methods of measurement, you may find that other website analytics tools such as Google Analytics calculate these metrics for your website differently. This may result in numbers that appear to conflict between multiple reporting systems.

The details below will give you insight into how we determine these numbers for your website and what exactly they mean.

Calculating Pageviews

We record a pageview for your website when any page of your website is requested from our servers. This includes both human visitors to your website and automated or computerized systems that may want to view your content for a variety of reasons.

Human visitors request your website a number of ways. For example, after finding it listed in the search engines, after clicking a link to your website that they find on another website, by entering your URL directly into their web browser, after viewing one of your ads on the Internet, or through a variety of other methods. Human visitors may request your website from a desktop or laptop computer or mobile devices like netbooks, PDAs, gaming systems, or mobile phones, etc.

Examples of computerized visitors includes third-party website analysis systems, security auditing systems, uptime auditing systems, ad serving systems like Google Adwords, or search engine spiders. These systems visit your website for a variety of reasons, some within your control, many of them out of your control. Frequent visits from search engine spiders typically represents a high level of interest in your website from the search engines. This means that new content on your website may be quickly discovered and made available within the search engines results pages.

One of the most sophisticated of the automated spiders is Googlebot, the software that Google uses to visit and understand your website for the Google search engine. Googlebot allows you some control over the freqency of its visits. You can choose a custom crawl rate for your website after setting up an account with Google Webmaster Tools and registering and verifying your website's sitemap (which is automatically created by Eden at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml). Within your Google Webmaster Tools account you can click on Site Configuration then Settings then look beside the Crawl Rate heading for the Set custom crawl rate option. Select a custom crawl rate that best matches your needs. Here is a sample screenshot of the custom crawl rate management interface within Google Webmaster Tools.

Since each page request, human or computerized, requires the Eden service to compute and deliver a page of your website we record that action as a single pageview. This is the most accurate way we can determine how much of our server resources your website is responsible for using.

Calculating Unique Visitors

Eden reviews the source of every incoming page request to see if it has recently communicated with it. If it has not, it begins a visitor session for that request source. For example, if I visit your website in my web browser for the first time right now, Eden will recognize that I have not recently requested a page from your website and it will assign a new visitor session to my computer for my visit.

If I continue to click around your website Eden will recognize my requests as part of the same visitor session. This technique is used to keep track of communication that comes in as one-time requests versus communication that is part of a longer conversation with your website. Eden implements this technique through the storage and retrieval of little pieces of anonymous and harmless information called cookies. Although cookies are ultimately controlled by each end-user's individual privacy settings and actions, cookies allow us to get the most accurate representation of the unique number of visitor sessions that are created with your website. We assume that each visitor session is one unique visitor to your website.