More Unique Visitors Please

Most people grasp the concept of unique visitors to a website. The official definition is  “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. Each individual is counted only once” (Web Analytics Association, 2008). Actually, persistent cookie IDs of visitors are counted. Avinash Kaushik (2010) calls the unique visitor metric “a superior approximation of the number of people visiting your website.”

The term “unique visitor” is what’s known as a foundational metric. Other basic building blocks of analytic reporting are pages, page views, visits (sessions), and events. If one is unfamiliar with a business, a glance at the counts and trends of foundational metrics provides a simple overview of a business’s online presence. In Google Analytics, unique visitors are known as “users.” (Schwartz, 2014).

(Credit: B.Schwartz)

Why Measure Unique Visitors? Although the number of unique visitors may ebb and flow, an upward trend is typically what businesses want to see. More unique visitors, qualified through search, advertising, marketing or social referral, translates into more potential for conversion. Hopefully, a portion this audience takes action that contributes to KPIs.

Spikes in unique visitors may indicate that discrete marketing efforts are working. A persistent dip in unique visitors could indicate a need to re-test and adjust marketing messages. Perhaps more resources should be dedicated to relevant, high-value content to retain unique visitors and cultivate their loyalty. A number of other factors could swell or shrink the number of unique visitors.

For example, a period of unusually warm weather in the Northeastern U.S. might send people outdoors for recreation, and away from their computers. Shopping seasonality could have an impact, as well. For example, the holidays and a marketing promotion converged on Cyber Monday last year, and masses of unique visitors crashed Target’s website (Wright, 2015).

(Credit: International Business Times)

Evaluating historical, unique-visitor volumes with an analytics tool could help marketers and IT anticipate issues and collaborate on solutions. In fact, Kaushik (2010) recommends retaining unique-visitor and other data for at least a year because of seasonality.

Unique-Visitor Subsets. Segmentation can reveal the composition of unique website visitors, how they are being referred, and what they are seeking. Google Analytics can also display visitor demographics and interests, collecting information from from unique visitors via DoubleClick, Android app activity, and iOS app activity. Marketers may find it useful to segment unique visitors to obtain additional user insights (Google, n.d.).

(Credit: Google)

And because Google Analytics uses the same age, gender and interest categories in its reports as in AdWords, marketers can target ads based on intelligence drawn from analytics reports (Google, n.d.). For example, if a business sells kitchen gadgets and Google Analytics shows higher conversion rates for unique visitors 35-44 years old than 25-34 year-olds, marketing might shift its efforts toward advertising to this group.

Besides measuring volumes of traffic from individual users, the unique-visitor metric is also the denominator in the popular Conversion Rate calculation (Kaushik recommends employing unique visitors, not visits, in this formula. As of the writing of his book, Google Analytics uses visits by default.)

Although unique-visitor data might sometimes be overshadowed by other metrics (characterization, engagement, conversion), it is a dependable workhorse in the marketer’s analytics stable.

References

Google. (n.d.). About demographics and interests. Google Analytics Help. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357?hl=en

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

Schwartz, B. (2014, April 17). Google Analytics: Visits now sessions & unique visitors now users. Search Engine Roundtable. Retrieved from https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-sessions-users-18424.html

Web Analytics Association. (2008, September 22). Web analytics definitions. Retrieved from: http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitions.pdf

Wright, B. (2015, November 30). Target’s website crashes over ‘high traffic’ during Cyber Monday. International Business Times. Retrieved from http://www.ibtimes.com/targets-website-crashes-over-high-traffic-during-cyber-monday-2204194