Unique Visitors…Oh my.

The Web Analytics world loves to debate the effectiveness of different analytical tools’ ability to measure Unique Visitors.  Often times the measurement of unique visitors is not as exact and concrete as Click-Through Rate, but, it can be a useful and important metric to take into consideration.  The following analysis will define Unique Visitors, explain how the metric is measured and applied by experts in the field, and how they can help businesses achieve their goals.

What is a Unique Visitor?

The Web Analytics Association defines Unique Visitors as:

“The number of inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), within a designated reporting timeframe, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site [where] each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period.” (2008).

Translation?  Unique Visitors are individual users who have accessed your website (Valela, 2014).  Each Unique Visitor is determined through the IP address of their computer/device combined with a cookie on the browser they are using (Valela, 2014). 

From this definition, what do you think makes web analysts and digital marketers hate this metric?  You guessed it!  If a visitor was borrowing their friend’s computer, they will be identified as the same person (essentially, two individuals=one unique visitor).  It is almost impossible to measure this metric accurately because each individual’s circumstances may be different.

Nevertheless, any measurement is better than no measurement, right?

How are Unique Visitors Measured?

As previously mentioned, Unique Visitors are tracked through the IP address of their computer/device, login ID’s from newly formed website subscriptions/accounts, or cookies (Kaushik, 2010).  Cookies, as Kaushik explains “anonymously, allow the website owner to measure the number of Visits and the Unique Visitors to the website and hence understand the Customer's website experience and segment visitors that are New to the site from those that are returning.”(2008).  Cookies also allow businesses to get a better understanding of metrics like Visits to Purchase and Conversion rates in addition to Unique Visitors…but I digress (Kaushik, 2008). 

So, What can the Unique Visitor Metric do for me?

Despite it’s flaws, the Unique Visitor metric can ultimately determine if you are attracting more traffic onto your website and, therefore, new customers.  However, this metric is only significant if these Unique Visitors are spending time looking at your pages and/or clicking through your website.  Therefore, measuring the Visit Duration and/or Page Views of each Unique Visitor is key.   Bounce Rate can also be helpful to measure as well.   

Beyond measurements, the real challenge is how to attract Unique Visitors to your website and, even more challenging, increase your conversion rate amongst Unique Visitors.  Maclean has been able to just this through strong  content, products/services, and marketing sell (aka creative copy, call-to-action, etc.). (2014).  Without these elements, visitors will most likely not remain consistent. When analyzing his website’s Unique Visitors to Visits ratio, Peter has found the same thing:

“If the visits/visitor metric holds steady at 1.2, then it’s likely I’ve seen a true increase in unique visitors. But if even as few as 10% of those new visits were redundant (i.e., the same visitor used multiple browsers, multiple computers, etc.), my visits per visitor metric would fall. Admittedly, not by much at first – just over a 1% decline. But it would fall. And if the trend continued, I’d have a sense something was going on. By contrast, if visits continued to climb at a faster rate than uniques, then clearly I’m getting more visits per visitor, which could indicate customers taking longer to decide, an improvement in “sticky” content, or any number of things, depending on my business.” (Peter, 2009)

In Conclusion….

Growth is key to any successful website.  When the number of Unique Visitors plateau and/or decrease along with visits, a digital marketer can assume that even your best customers are displeased with your product/service, not spreading the word to their friends, and have taken their business elsewhere. 

We welcome Unique Visitors here.

References:

Kaushik, A. (11 September 2006).  Standard Metrics Revisited: #1 Visitors.  Occam’s Razor.  Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-1-visitors/

Kaushik, A. (24 July 2008).  A Primer on Web Analytics Visitor Tracking Cookies.  Occam’s Razor.  Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-visitor-tracking-cookies/

Kaushik, A. (20 April 2009).  Standard Metrics Revisited: #6 Daily, Weekly, Monthly Unique Visitors.  Occam’s Razor.  Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-6-daily-weekly-monthly-unique-visitors/

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity (p. 126-127). Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing.

Kaushik, A. (29 April 2013).  Eight Silly Data Myths Marketing People Believe That Get Them Fired.  Occam’s Razor.  Retrieved from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/silly-marketing-data-strategy-metrics-mistakes/

Maclean, M. (24 March 2014).  Conversion Case Study: How I Made $7,115 from 85 Unique Visitors.  ProBlogger.  Retrieved from http://www.problogger.net/archives/2014/03/24/conversion-case-study-how-i-made-7115-from-85-unique-visitors/

Peter, T. (18 February 2009).  Are Unique Visitors a Meanigful Measure of Your Website’s Traffic?  Tim Peter & Associates.  Retrieved from http://www.timpeter.com/2009/02/18/are-unique-visitors-a-meaningful-measure-of-your-websites-traffic/

Valela, A. (26 November 2014).  What’s More Important: Page Views or Unique Visitors?  Agility.  Retrieved from http://blog.agilitycms.com/content-managers/what-s-more-important-page-views-or-unique-visitors

Web Analytics Association.  (2008).  Web Analytics Definitions.  Web Analytics Association (p. 12).  Wakefield, MA; Web Analytics Association.

The Magical Metric: Click-Through Rate

Click-throughs, as defined by the Web Analytics association, is a visitor characterization metric that tracks “the number of times a link was clicked by a visitor” (2008). Click-through Rate (CTR) is the ratio that measures “The number of click-throughs for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed.” (Web Analytics Association, 2008). While it can be applied in many ways, CTR is used heavily to measure the effectiveness of these three web marketing tactics: Search Engine Optimization, Email Campaigns, and Website Optimization.


Search Engine Optimization

When a business/individual creates and pays for online advertisement with Google AdWords (a Pay-per-click (PPC) online advertiser), Google interprets the CTR of that ad “to be a good indicator of how relevant and appropriate your ad is to meeting the requirements of the user” (Kirk, 2014). The level of appropriateness then affects the ad’s position in a search, aka Is it first? Or is it fourth?, a position that can make or break the traffic flow and potential conversions from your website.

In Aargaard’s extensive experience with online PPC and email ad campaigns, he found that even the tiniest changes in creative copy can lead to an instant increase (or decrease) in CTR. In this one particular case study, Aargaard’s copy tweak led to a 90% increase in CTR to the payment page: 

“Unbounce.com and I recently ran a split test on a PPC landing page that pitches a free 30-day trial of the Unbounce.com landing page platform. The only thing we did was to tweak one word in the copy – we changed the possessive determiner 'You' to 'My'. After running the test for three weeks, the treatment button copy, 'Start my free 30 day trial' had increased the click through rate to the payment page by 90%.” (Aagaard, 2013) 


Email Campaigns 

The Click to Open Rate (CTOR) is often used synonymously with CTR when discussing the Click-throughs of an email campaign (Olson, 2012). According to Kaushik, CTOR is “a key measure of the quality of your email list and the effectiveness and relevance of your message” (2010). When using A/B testing to different segmented audiences, CTOR is almost always used to determine user level of interest in the message being sent by the business. This measurement and it’s effects are incredibly similar to how businesses use CTR with PPC ad for search engine optimization. The only difference is that, through CTOR measurements, emails can be greatly segmented and/or personalized towards the business’s target market and/or targeted individuals (Bhele, 2014). In return, websites can potentially gain more visits and conversions depending on the campaign objectives.


Website Optimization 

The best is always saved for last. The CTR metric is one of the best metrics you can use to optimize your business’ website. Why? You can follow click-throughs to better understand the paths your visitors’ take while navigating your site. These paths (also known as clickstreams) give you insight to your vistors’ behavior and can immediately tell you which areas or clickstreams could be improved in order for your business to maximize conversions and make a profit.

During an interview with a Web Analyst for one of Interabrand’s top ranking business-to-business ecommerce companies, M. Williams, she told me that they use CTR, in place of usability testing, to justify proposed changes for their main ecommerce portal. In a current test to determine whether or not to keep a sidebar in their page design, their team creates benchmarks set a two standard deviations above and below their pre-determined CTR average. “If the majority of click-throughs is below the standard of deviation, the sidebar will be removed and design will be changed” (M. Williams, personal communication, January 25, 2015).

Williams also recommended that Historical data of visitor clickstreams be taken into consideration when determining CTR averages to improve website design. The comparison between past and current data can determine which design features need more or no attention based on their performance. (M. Williams, personal communication, January 25, 2015).

Focusing on the CTR data from clickstreams that the majority of visitors don’t take (aka the Outliers) should not be overlooked either. Finding the reason behind this rare behavior and optimizing these weak points can potentially attract a different kind of visitor which can lead to business with an entirely different market segment. A resulted increase in customer acquisition can of course lead to overall business profit.



References: 
Aagaard, M. (25 March 2013). 10 Call-to-Action Case Studies w/ Takeaways & Examples from Real Button Tests. Content Verve. Retrieved from http://contentverve.com/10-call-to-action-case-studies-examples-from-button-tests/

Bhele, R. (20 November 2014). How to Interpret Email Marketing Statistics. Hallam Internet Limited. Retrieved from http://www.hallaminternet.com/2014/email-marketing-statistics/#ixzz3PsEKK3Kn 

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity (p. 120). Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing.

Kirk, E (22 September 2014). What is Quality Score in Adwords? Hallam Internet Limited. Retrieved from http://www.hallaminternet.com/2014/adwords-what-is-quality-score/#ixzz3PsCGtUjH

Kirk, E (22 October 2014). How to Measure Adwords Success? Hallam Internet Limited. Retrieved from http://www.hallaminternet.com/2014/measure-adwords-success/#ixzz3PsCqmIp6

Olson, C. (28 March 2012). The Email Metric You Should Be Tracking But Aren’t. Marketing Land. Retrieved from http://marketingland.com/the-email-metric-you-should-be-tracking-but-arent-8879

Web Analytics Association. (2008). Web Analytics Definitions. Web Analytics Association (p. 20). Wakefield, MA; Web Analytics Association.