Tracking visitor IP/Clicks in PHP

I am trying to write a script or more like come up with a simple logic to track clicks or visits. I don't need to track each page, just as long as they land on the homepage is where I want to store it as 1 click.

First of all, is it safe to say that tracking by IP is far from accurate because many开发者_如何学运维 users can be under the same IP?

Currently my logic to do this is set a cookie on client side with a flag when they land on the homepage for the first time. At that point, I would update the database with 1 unqiue click as unique. Then each time this same visitor visits, the homepage would check for the flag and if it exists, update the database with 1 raw click....etc.

I do know that if they dump their cookies, it would throw off the data but generally, is this how it is done?

Do you have a better way?

Try this to retrieve the ip of the visitor, it works fine for my statistics :

function get_ip()
{
    if($_SERVER){
        if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']))
            $adress = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];
        elseif(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP']))
            $adress = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
        else
            $adress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    } else {
        if(getenv('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'))
            $adress = getenv('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR');
        elseif(getenv('HTTP_CLIENT_IP'))
            $adress = getenv('HTTP_CLIENT_IP');
        else
            $adress = getenv('REMOTE_ADDR');
    }

    return $adress;
}