Understanding unique visitors = understanding your audience
The term “unique visitor,” in web metrics jargon, refers to an individual person who visits a website within a specified time period. It’s also referred to as a user. This counts the visitor once regardless of whether they come to your site more than once within that timeframe. Since I’m studying web metrics through Google Analytics, at least for now, this is how GA defines unique visitors, using the term users: “Google uses a unique identifier (usually based on a first-party cookie) to keep track of users and identify returning visitors vs. unique visitors over a specific time period” (Mastrianna, 2021). If a visitor comes back—another “session,” in the lingo—they still only count as one. I imagine them as party-goers with a stamp on their hand so they can leave and come back into the club. Nice to imagine your website as a hot spot, right?
The point of unique visitors: Why count the hand stamps?
Understanding the definition of unique visitor is all well and good, but as with any metric, it’s only as useful as your business finds it to be. Analytics wizard Avinash Kaushik put it succinctly in two meaty quotes. First, he said, “Metrics form the life blood of all the measurement we do. They are the reason we call the web the most accountable channel on the planet” (2010; emphasis original). Still, accountability means bupkis without an understanding of what we’re accountable to. This is where business objectives come in, as Kaushik said: “Without a clearly defined list of business objectives you are doomed” (2010). Luckily, the objectives should be dumb, or rather DUMB—an acronym for doable, understandable, manageable, and beneficial. When it comes to unique visitors, tracking this number may help support an overarching business objective for increased sales, since a goal supporting that objective could be to increase unique visits (see fig. 1). Notice that monthly unique visitors are a KPI (key performance indicator)—a metric with a shiny badge of importance because it allows you to measure progress toward your goal.
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| Figure 1: A student’s analysis of a bike company website shows how the unique visitor metric becomes a KPI (Kaushik, 2010). |
Understanding unique visitors—considered a “foundational” metric by West Virginia University’s Integrated Marketing Communications program (Reed College, 2022)—will take you a long way toward understanding your web traffic, your audience, and hence planning your digital strategy moving forward (Schneider, 2021).
Setting goals: How do you know if your club is full enough?
In the figure above, unique visitors per month have a KPI target of 13,000. How was that number reached? How do you know if the goal is too high or too low? This is where more research comes into play, especially into your competitors, but also into the technology you’re using to count unique visitors in the first place.
As Annie Summerall (2017) wrote, unique visitor numbers “can get cloudy.” For example, if someone clears their cookies or visits your site in two different browsers (such as once on their phone and once on their laptop, or more than once using Chrome’s incognito mode), they will show up twice. Also, if your specified timeframe is long, such as the month given in the figure example above, the cookies using to track them may expire and again make them show up more than once (see fig. 2).
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| Figure 2: An example of how one unique visitor can count as two (Adams, 2012). |
Other traffic analysis tools, such as Similarweb, avoid using cookies for reasons such as this and instead collect data from other sources (Schneider, 2021). Technology concerns aside, in Google Analytics “the deviation is negligible and shouldn’t make much of a difference unless you’re working with a very small sample size” (Mastrianna, 2019).
Next, how you determine the KPI target is a thorny question. A good start is examining industry benchmarks using either data provided by tools like SEMRush or independent reports by groups like Statista. (Pro tip: If you’re a student, you may be able to access Statista reports at no cost through your library. That’s the case at WVU.) Next, drill down to see how many unique visitors your top competitors get.
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| Figure 3: August 2021 data from SEMRush on monthly unique visitors to four top meal kit delivery service sites (Jones, 2021). |
For example, if you’re working for a meal kit delivery service, you might look up the monthly unique visitors on SEMRush (see fig. 3). Still, if your business is small, set your sights at a reasonable level. See what visitors you’re pulling in currently, then pick a percentage increase, such as 10%, and ensure that your content strategy is aligned to build that up (and that your goals are set to be able to use the unique visitors KPI to its full effect) (Jones, 2021).
You have the numbers. What next?
Once there’s a KPI target in place, unique visitors can be a splendid reason to up your content marketing game. More content leads to more reasons for people to visit your site, so measuring unique visitors alongside other metrics such as visit characterization (in particular landing pages—which I’ll examine in another post) and visitor characterization (new and returning visitors, bounce rates) can start to show a clear picture of whether visitors to your site are tuning in to the content you’re offering. Placing these web metrics side by side with social media and advertising data can also key you in to where you’re finding the most visitors.
Thanks for reading! How do you envision using the unique visitor metric as a KPI?
I think you make a good point that unique visitors are a crucial metric to measure, but they need to be associated with others such as interactions and page views to get a better overall understanding of what the consumer is doing.
ReplyDeleteHi Laura,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that Similarweb resource! I use their data to understand how we are performing against competitors (market share). How they track visits and unique visits helps me understand why it is different from our web analytics. Unique visitors seems like the best metric for tracking market share, which is what I calculate with that Similarweb data.
All the best,
-Danielle