Found this thread because I, too, have been wondering if there’s anything like WP-Stats — but with unique visitor counts included.
I don’t know for sure, but I would guess the reason WP-Stats doesn’t include uniques, is because it would require logging the IP address of every single person who visits your blog.
WP-Stats runs on wordpress.com’s servers, and it’s offered for free to anyone who wishes to use it. Granted, what WP-Stats DOES already is no small task, but it seems to me like logging IP addresses and comparing old ones to new ones (to determine if someone’s unique or not) could slow things down somewhat.
I remember back in the late 90s, when a website called “Hitbox” (which eventually became “Web Side Story”… or was it vice versa?) offered a great, free counter that tracked uniques. You could even see which “paths” people took as they clicked from page to page within your website. It was really awesome. But it was only a couple years later until the software got bogged down with ads and it seemed like the results were nowhere as accurate as they used to be.
In any event, if anyone out there does know of a good program that can track uniques, please let me know. I’m also running FeedBurner on my websites in order to track stats, but FeedBurner’s numbers often vary greatly from WP-Stats. I especially hate how FeedBurner will, for some odd reason, record hits for the same page in different places on the “top pages” list, leaving me to manually add up the hit counts to determine the true rankings. (If all the hits come from the same page with the same permalink, why do some get listed separately??)
I love WP-Stats because it’s got a better layout and it’s much faster than FeedBurner. But it doesn’t show me what countries people come from, what browsers they’re using, screen resolutions… FeedBurner does. It would be great to get one stats package that can show me ALL of these things (plus unique visitor counts) in one place.
