The Value of Unique Visitors and How to Interpret this Metric

Unique Visitors Defined

Unique visitors are, simply put, “the number of unduplicated visitors to your website over the course of a specific time period. 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). As the marketer, you can easily change the time period in question, choosing a day to seven days to a month. It’s important to clarify that the number of unique visitors will be less than both the number of total visitors and total sessions because these two metrics will count whether one user visits the website multiple times.

Unique Visitors Use

The metric unique visitors determines how many people visit the website. This metric focuses more on the number of people, rather than the volume of visits. There’s a few reasons measuring unique visitors is important.

First, it shows how many people encounter your content. If a company is “partnering” with others and selling ad spaces (like a Google Display Network approach), then this metric is vital. If not a lot of people are coming to your website, then not a lot of people will see the ad. In that case, the investment of an ad isn’t worth it.

Second, this metric provides insight on your target audience’s behaviors. Do they return to look at your content? Are they engaging with it or bouncing from the site immediately? What draws them in? Does your blog have more visitors than your other pages? Marketers can gather a lot of information from this metric (Unique Visitors – Metric, n.d.).

Third, marketers can compare unique visitors versus total visitors. How many of the unique visitors return? If your website has a lot of unique visitors but not many returning visitors, you need to reconsider your website content. The conversion rate is low. A potential fix is adding a call-to-action on pages that see a lot of unique visitors but few returning visitors. You can adapt them to become high-converting pages.

Real-World Example Usage of Unique Visitors

The company that I work for, ABWE International, had little to no digital presence before I was hired. While it had a website, blog, and social media accounts, they were barely maintained. This caused a lot of users to bounce almost immediately because the UX wasn’t cohesive or user-friendly. A local, contract company helped with on-page SEO for the blog, but once the user was on the site, they weren’t shown a clear place to go.

After my coworker and I were hired, we looked at the Google Analytics behind the website and saw that there were a lot of unique visitors but not a lot of returning visitors. By analyzing the unique visitors, we were able to see where people began to drop off and what we could to do optimize their experience. The unique visitors metric allowed us to recognize a problem with the website and implement changes to help the organization’s online presence grow.

References:

Mastrianna, Logan. (2021). Everything you need to know about unique visitors in Google Analytics. Data Driven. Retrieved from https://www.datadrivenu.com/unique-visitors-in-google-analytics/.

Unique Visits – Metric. (n.d.) Grow Hack Scale. Retrieved from https://growhackscale.com/glossary/unique-visits-metric#:~:text=Why%20Is%20It%20Important%20to%20Measure%20Unique%20Visitors,-It%20is%20important&text=First%20of%20all%2C%20unique%20visitors,will%20see%20it%20three%20times.