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I'm creating a django website with Apache2 as the server. I need a way to determine the number of unique visitors to my website (specifically to every page in particular) in a full proof way. Unfortunately users will have high incentives to try to "game" the tracking systems so I'm trying to make it full proof.

Is there any way of doing this?

Currently I'm trying to use IP & Cookies to determine unique visitors, but this system can be easily fooled with a headless browser.

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3 Answers

As HTML Requests are stateless and you have no control over the users behavior on his clientside, there is no bulletproof way.

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Unless it's necessary that the data be integrated into your Django database, I'd strongly recommend "outsourcing" your traffic to another provider. I'm very happy with Google Analytics.

Failing that, there's really little you can do to keep someone from gaming the system. You could limit based on IP address but then of course you run into the problem that often many unique visitors share IPs (say, via a university, organization, or work site). Cookies are very easy to clear out, so if you go that route then it's very easy to game.

One thing that's harder to get rid of is files stored in the appcache, so one possible solution that would work on modern browsers is to store a file in the appcache. You'd count the first time it was loaded in as the unique visit, and after that since it's cached they don't get counted again.

Of course, since you presumably need this to be backwards compatible then of course it leaves it open to exactly the sorts of tools which are most likely to be used for gaming the system, such as curl.

You can certainly block non-browserlike user agents, which makes it slightly more difficult if some gamers don't know about spoofing browser agent strings (which most will quickly learn).

Really, the best solution might be -- what is the outcome from a visit to a page? If it is, for example, selling a product, then don't award people who have the most page views; award the people whose hits generate the most sales. Or whatever time-consuming action someone might take at the page.

Possible solution:

If you're willing to ignore people with JavaScript disabled, you could choose to count only people who access the page and then stay on that page for a given window of time (say, 1 minute). After a given period of time, do an Ajax request back to the server. So if they tried to game by changing their cookie and loading multiple tabs at once, it wouldn't work because they'd need to have the same cookie in order to register that they'd been on that page long enough. I actually think this might work; I can't honestly see a way to game that. Basically on the server side you store a dictionary called stay_until in request.session with keys for each unique page and after 1 minute or so you run an Ajax call back to the server. If the value for stay_until[page_id] is less than or equal to the current time, then they're an active user, otherwise they're not. This means that it will take someone at least 20 minutes to generate 20 unique visitors, and so long as you make the payoff worth less than the time consumed that will be a strong disincentive.

I'd even make it more explicit: on the bottom of the page in a noscript tag, put "Your access was not counted. Turn on JavaScript to be counted" with a page that lays out the tracking process.

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Unfortunately my site will only be visited a few milliseconds (it calculates something, then it redirects to a third party). Your alternate solution for other services might work. I'm going to try to run google analytics separate from my service, to see which is more accurate. Thanks! –  user502248 Mar 19 '12 at 15:30
You could open the third party page in a 100%x100% iframe and continue the traffic checking in the background. –  Jordan Reiter Mar 19 '12 at 15:33
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The only way you're going to be able to track "unique" visitors in a fool-proof way is to make it contingent on some controlled factor such as a login. Anything else can and will fail to be completely accurate.

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