What is Unique about Unique Visitors?

There’s an old business adage that whatever is worth doing is worth measuring. Website analytics provide insights and data that can be used to create a better user experience for website visitors, but it goes beyond that. It’s a guidebook for a business to assess their marketing efforts and online presence. It helps discover what works, what doesn’t work and what can be improved in order to maximize results (Flores, 2017).

A website is the single most important marketing tool for a business. It serves as a virtual equivalent of a physical business for the 3 billion internet users. Think about it: when you want to learn more about a company or are searching for products or services, you usually turn to a search engine which eventually leads you to a businesses’ website. While this would lead many people to believe that the number of page views or page visitors is the most important foundational metric, one could argue that unique visitors are equally, if not more, important (Villegas, 2016).

 “Unique visitors” refers to the actual number of people who have come to your website at least once during a reporting period. This number does not increase if a previous visitor returns to a page multiple times. So, if you visit Sarah vs. Web Analytics ten times in a day, it is recorded as just one unique visitor instead of ten visits. This metric gives a business a sense of the true size of their audience (Reed College of Media, 2018).

But, how does an analytics program like Google Analytics know someone has already visited previously? It measures by tracking IP addresses and cookies. For all of the tech nerds out there, this is the ‘_utma cookie.’

One issue with this metric is that these numbers can often times become cloudy. For example, many people use different browsers, browse from multiple devices, use multiple IP addresses or clear their cookies regularly while surfing. So, someone navigating to a site through three different browsers will be counted as three unique visitors. Someone who scrolled through a product page on their phone but moved to desktop for purchasing is considered two unique visitors (Summerall, 2017).

While all metrics come with a caution sign, the unique visitors’ metric is still one of the best ways when trying to gauge the impact of a campaign and the true size of the audience that you reached.

For example, Buffer, a social media management platform, launched a campaign in 2015 to discover exactly how Facebook’s algorithm for newsfeeds worked. They wanted to help their audience, and customers, understand how to get their updates viewed on Facebook. The post quickly gained traction, and within its first couple of weeks ranked at the top of the search engine results pages for “Facebook News Feed algorithm,” and similar terms. 

Buffer deemed the campaign a success based on the number of unique visitors that the post received. Decoding the Facebook News Feed: An Up-to-Date List of the Algorithm Factors and Changes generated 97,427 unique visitors in four short months (Weaver, 2015). The ability to point to tangible results from a marketing campaign, especially one as successful as Buffer’s, can grant credibility and help “follow the bright spots” to ensure future campaign success. Check out my follow up post, The Marriage of Bounce Rate and Conversion, to delve into engagement and bounce rate.

References

Flores, T. (2017, April 18). 8 Website Analytics Tools You Should Be Using. Retrieved from https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/8-website-analytics-tools-you-should-be-using

Reed College of Media. (2018). IMC 642-Week 1 Lesson: Intro to Web Analytics and the Basics of Web Analytics. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_99069_1&content_id=_4524698_1&framesetWrapped=true  

Summerall, A. (2017, October 27). Marketing 101:What is a unique visitor? Retrieved from https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/search-marketing/marketing-101-what-is-unique-visitor/

Villegas, F. (2016, June 13). 3 Reasons Why Your Website is the Most Important Marketing Tool You Have. Retrieved from https://getlevelten.com/blog/felipa-villegas/3-reasons-why-your-website-most-important-marketing-tool-you-have
Weaver, O. (2015, March 9). A Look Inside the Marketing Campaign that Generated over 97K Unique Visitors for Buffer. Retrieved from https://radius.com/2015/03/09/look-inside-marketing-campaign-generated-97k-unique-visitors-buffer/