We would like to advise you of two important rules changes agreed by JICWEBS.
1) Change to Unique User metric
As of the 1st of January 2008, the industry-agreed definition approved by JICWEBS (the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards, www.jicwebs.org) for the Unique User metric will change from:
Old Definition
Unique User (User)
A unique and valid identifier. Sites may use (i) IP+User-Agent, (ii) Cookie and/or (iii) Registration ID.
Explanatory Note to Old Definition:
This metric does NOT measure a person. Instead, it is a measure of a device through which a person interacts with a website or network, in common with all measurement software.
Where a Unique User is calculated by IP+User-Agent, this definition may overstate or understate the real number of individual Users concerned due to dynamic IP address allocation (for example by a dial-up Internet Service Provider) or to significant levels of uniformity in IP and browser configurations operating through a proxy. ABCe will discuss with the site where they wish to use an alternative identifier (e.g. registration IDs for Registered Unique Users, cookies, etc.) which offer additional methods of defining different Unique Users visiting the site. Certain classes of traffic are not valid Users and must be excluded. The Visit metric will be calculated on the basis of the User metric used.
This metric can also be known as a (Unique) Visitor, (Unique) Browser, or Unique.
to:
New Definition
Unique User/Browser
A unique and valid identifier. Sites may use (i) IP+User-Agent and/or (ii) Cookie.
This metric does NOT measure a person. Instead, it is a measure of a device through which a person interacts with a website or network, in common with all measurement software.
Where a Unique User is calculated by IP+User-Agent, this definition may overstate or understate the real number of individual Users concerned due to dynamic IP address allocation (for example by a dial-up Internet Service Provider) or to significant levels of uniformity in IP and browser configurations operating through a proxy. ABCe will discuss with the site where they wish to use an alternative identifier (e.g. cookies) which offer additional methods of counting Unique User/Browsers visiting the site. Certain classes of traffic are not valid Users and must be excluded. The Visit metric will be calculated on the basis of the Unique User/Browser metric used.
This metric is sometimes known as a (Unique) Visitor, (Unique) Browser, or Unique.
In addition, for all audit periods from 01 January 2008 onwards, as noted above, JICWEBS have adopted the term "Unique User/Browser" (UU/😎 to replace the current term "Unique User" (UU). Hence, this new term will appear on ABCe audit certificates for periods of January 2008 and later.
