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.