How Unique are You?

           One of the first things a marketer does to begin the process of analyzing their website performance is to determine how many people are coming to their site.  Measuring unique visitors is one of the foundational web metrics available to marketers.  Ideally, this metric tells us the “number of individual people (typically having spiders and robots filtered from calculation), within a defined reporting timeframe, that visited a site.  Each individual is counted only once for a TBD reporting period” (“Lesson 2”, 2013).  This metric is foundational because it can be measured on its own or as the denominator in other web metric formulas.  While this metric is widely used, it comes with a few caveats that marketers need to keep in mind.

            While the definition quotes “number of individual people”, unique visitors really measures the number of unique “browsers”.  This is because people use browsers to access websites.  Unique visitors can be “influenced by browsers that don’t accept cookies or those that reject third-party cookies” (Kaushik, 2010, p. 39).  Most analytics tools use first-party cookies which are rejected less than third-party cookies.  First-party cookies are rejected 2 to 5 percent of the time, while third-party cookies are rejected 10 to 30 percent of the time (Kaushik, 2010).

            Another nuance to keep in mind, especially now, is how users are accessing sites through multiple channels.  Since analytics tools track unique visitors through unique browsers, they count each visit per device by the same person as a unique visitor (Gianoglio, 2012).  For example, I visit a website on my PC to shop for shoes while I am at work.  Later at lunch, I visit the same website on my phone to show my friends at work the shoes I want to buy.  Finally, when I am at home on my couch, I use my tablet to visit the site and purchase the shoes.  Although I am one unique person, because I visited the site through three separate devices, I would be counted as three unique visitors.

            Lastly, not only do different browsers and different devices qualify as a unique visitor, but so does a direct visit from a mobile application.  When a user is in Twitter or another application and clicks on a button to open a link in another page, that visit is counted as a unique visitor.  Even if the user accessed the website previously through their mobile browser, traffic from an application will come through analytics tools as a unique visitor (Gianoglio, 2012).

            Overall, the unique visitor metric is an important metric for all marketers.  Even though it may not be 100% accurate, it is the best indicator of the number of people that visit a website.  This metric can be used to analyze traffic on a daily or weekly basis, or any determined time frame.  It is not only valuable on its own, but helps create ratio metrics, such as visits per visitor or conversion rate.  The unique visitors metric builds the foundation for all web measures.  These important measures can be key performance indicators and provide vital actionable information for marketers to improve performance.  

References

Gianoglio, J. (2012, July 10). Unique visitors in a multi-device world. LunaMetrics [Blog]. Retrieved from http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2012/07/10/multidevice-multibrowser-visitors/

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

Lesson 2: Basic Web Analytics. (2013). P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webct/urw/tp0.lc5116001/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct