Successive Visits by Same IP

how should they be counted?

When a visitor comes to your site and navigates your pages, we have to be able to recognize the fact that a single person is loading successive pages. The first load starts a new 'visit' and the successive loads constitute 'page views' inside that visit

In order to recognize successive loads of your account by a given visitor, we normally rely on cookies (if enabled) or on session storage. If we do not recognize the visitor, we check the IP (as a backup, for instance if the cookies got reset). If it is the same IP within a short amount of time, we consider by default that it must be the same visitor and count the load as a page view instead of a new visit.

However, this assumption is not always true. For instance, if the visitor is in a large office where many computers share the same IP, then you want to tell Web-Stat to change its default behavior.

This is what that setting is for: set on 'do not assume based on IP' in order to change the default behavior.