Web Analytics: Do You Know the Difference Between Unique Visitor, Visitor and Visit?

There are a variety of metrics when measuring your company’s website performance and one that has always been a little murky for me was the difference between unique visitor, visitor and visit. According to the Web Analytics Association, the definition for unique visitor is “The number of inferred individual people, within a designated reporting time frame, with activity consisting of one or more visits to a site”. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for a reporting period.

According to Web Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, a frequent resource for easy simple explanations, the metric of unique visitors, albeit an important number, will not provide insight into how much the visitors liked the web site. The metric can reveal if advertising choices are performing or if a blog link or mentions are getting activity or sparking some noise on the Internet.

For the novice web analytical individual, what this means is that when an individual visits a website such as Nordstrom.com for the the first time, a cookie will be created by the enterprise with a unique identification value (ID). The ID value tracks the individual every time when visiting the site over a certain timeframe. If the same visitor visits the Nordstrom site ten (10) times in one week, that translates into one unique visitor. To place a value on this metric, let’s think of a business website as a virtual brick and mortar. If we look at the unique visitors of Nordstrom in March of 2016 of 9 million, as demonstrated in the graph below, if 1% of these visitors convert to a sale of $100 that is equal to $9 million in revenue.

The unique visitors’ metric is often used to measure audience size. The unique visitor metric needs to be tracked over a range of time because companies have already established that they do not buy in the first visit and if counted multiple times it will inflate the visitor count. Typically, it may take four or five visits before the shopper empties the shopping car or takes action. This metric is important because if a business knows in advance the average number of visits it takes before a purchase, then a strategic acquisition strategy can be established to entice the prospect throughout the buyer’s journey. We all can agree that a business should be aware of how many virtual visitors are visiting the company’s website because visitors equal traffic. Again, when compared to a brick and mortar store, foot traffic equals prospects and the more foot traffic a business cultivates the higher the potential for increased sales.  

But wait, a visitor came to the website ten times, doesn’t that count? In this particular example it would probably be better to track and measure what is called visit (sessions) for each time the visitor came to the website. This metric will count the number of pages visited or viewed, according to the Digital Analytical Association Standards Committee. One could think of it as how many times a shopper walked into the store and just looked.  It is a little deeper than window shopping, the visitor actually walked around to different departments and spent some time looking at different merchandise.  These are comparable to visits and sessions. Unique visitors are a fundamental universal metric that can often be viewed in a site overview page of the software programs such as Yahoo, Web Analytics, Omniture, and WebTrends. The unique visitors can be viewed, daily, weekly, monthly and in some cases even absolute unique visitors, which de-dupes the unique visitors over a certain time period. This metric is helpful for marketers when tracking market share. One caveat as an example is if a visitor has multiple devices and logs into the website using different browsers. Essentially, each unique device along with the different browser counts as a unique visitor. However, it is actually the same visitor. As you can see the numbers can be skewed. In this particular case, we all have multiple devices and should be a concern for the web analytic professional. 

Thank you for reading and I would love for you to follow my blog over the next 7 weeks.  What is your takeaway on how this information might work for you in your business?  Let me know and join the conversation. Please leave a comment, share an example or simply like the blog post. More followers equal a larger audience; a larger audience means that the content is being shared.