Hi there, I use Google Analytics and I 100% agree with you that there is an issue with bot visits being counted and giving you a larger number than what is really happening.
This is how I manage to count 'real' visitors using Google Analytics. It's a little clunky but it works:
1. When you're on your site data, on the vertical column of options on the left of the screen, click on "Aquisition", then on the "Overview" sub-menu.
2. It'll pull up some data on what method your various visitors got to your site.
I total up my estimate of "Real Visitors" by adding up the number of visits from "Organic Search" + "Social". I pretty much ignore "Referral". Most of those are bots, at least for me. The exception is if you know you've legitimately been featured/linked to from someone else's site. If that's the case, click on your "referral" visits to break them down by site, and see how many you received from that particular site you'd been featured on. Even for my site that has been featured strongly on someone else's site, I personally found that their referrals count for only a small percent of the total referrals, the rest of which I always assume are bot visits. I would not recommend clicking on any of those bot sites that come up on your Referrals list, even if they look legitimate. Many are malware/spam sites.
Like I said, this method is clunky, but it'll give you a much closer estimate than the raw data. I think this issue is a big loophole in Google Analytics, and I can't believe they don't have better bot filters. I do have a couple of other options for you to get a feel for your visitors, but the other 2 options are in a sense even more limited than Goolge Analytics.
Extra option 1: If you're running AdSense on your site, I actually use AdSense as a fairly accurate measure of traffic. If you look at your AdSense stats under "Performance Reports", it'll tell you how many
page views you had. NOTE: Don't get confused between page views and impressions (=ad views) - if you have 2 ads per page then your ad views will generally = 2x your page views. Page views is what you need. AdSense does a pretty good job of filtering out bot traffic and your own visits. I find that usually, the number of views from my Google Analytics "real visitors" that I told you about above, is pretty close to the number of AdSense page views. It's not the same exact number, but it's in the ball-park. Obviously this only works for sites that are running AdSense. It won't tell you which visitors are unique visitors. FYI - If you have multiple sites you can get Adsense results per site by setting up URL channels.
Extra option 2: You can get a feel for your real visitors by checking your Alexa.com stats. It's not very effective because your site won't even register on Alexa until it gets a certain amount of traffic. Also, your Alexa rank won't necessarily tell you much about actual numbers of visitors to the site. I did find they do a pretty good job of estimating 'real' traffic only, not bot traffic though. It's the least accurate way to measure anything, but it does give you a good relative feel of
how your site is doing over time, relative to other sites out there.
@Kate - I'm not sure if I have possibly misunderstood your question? Unique visitors is generally defined as visits originating from a specific IP address. In other words, if you have a site that I visit 6 times that week from my home computer, it would be 6 total visits, but my visits would only count as 1 unique visit over that time period. (However, if I visited you once from my home computer, once from work, once from my friend's place etc then those would count as unique visits since they're from different IP's).
So in conclusion
@UniflexDomains , you have identified a very real problem and there is no one-size-fits-all answer to it. My preferred method is the Google Analytics calculation I outlined at the beginning of my reply, but it's far from perfect. I'm interested to learn what alternative methods others are using, and I'd love to hear from others on this.