“Unique visitors are defined as the number of
inferred individual people (filtered for spiders and robots), 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 the reporting period” (Hamel, 2008). Unique visitors are always calculated
for a time period and a time reference. Some examples of time periods measured
are days, weeks, and months.
The most predominant method of
identifying unique visitors is via a persistent cookie that stores and returns
a unique ID value. Other methods of inferring unique visitors uses tricks to
come up with a fair count of unique visitors for example looking at the
combination of browser version, host OS, or IP address. One theory is that the
most accurate way of counting unique visitors is to use an account ID, but
still sites will have non-authenticated users (Hamel, 2008).
Some studies show that 97% of
users accept cookies and with that statistic the accuracy of the unique visitor
count will be as high as 99.5%. However there has also been contradictory
research that shows a large percentage of people delete their cookies
automatically or manually every month. This means that the longer the time
reference analyzed, the less accurate the unique visitors will be. For example
if Susan automatically deletes her cookies once a month and a company wants to
get monthly unique visitors based on a full year reference, she will be counted
12 times instead of just once (Hamel, 2008).
Other issues come into play
calculating unique visitors when people use multiple devices, which is now
majority of the population. If Susan accesses one site using Internet Explorer
on her work computer, then visits the same site using Safari on her iPhone, and
goes home and looks at the same site using Google Chrome on her personal
computer, that’s 3 unique visits for one user. Multiple devices have the
potential for companies to have an inflated impression of their unique visitors
(Hamel, 2008).
There is some debate on which
matters more page views or unique visitors. Page views are important for
publishers because each page view tallies an ad impression for each ad on the
page. If their ads are sold on a cost per thousand views or CPM basis, this is
an important number for them to grow. However the unique visitor metric gives
companies a sense of the size of their audience. The importance of this metric
depends on the purpose of the site or publication. Brands might want to maximize
the number of people that come to their site with little regard to how many
pages they access, as long as the follow a chosen path through the site. Niche
publishers may not have a huge audience and want to show loyalty and engagement
by clicking deep into the site, generating page views (“What’s more
important:,” 2012).
In October of 2012 Google+
attracted 105 million unique visitors compared to 65.3 million in October 2011,
a 60.9% increase. In that same time period Facebook had 822.1 million unique
visitors, up 4.3% from 788.2 million the previous year. Twitter had 182.9
million unique visitors and LinkedIn claimed 161.9 million. Google can use the
information provided about their unique visitors to see if they have
accomplished their growth figures for the year. These unique visitors are
calculated as users and they can use this data to identify the success of their
social media platform. They saw extreme growth in a year compared to Facebook,
which is their top competitor. This metric also allows them to see how they
compare to the competition. Even though they might have a smaller number of
users, the growth the company is seeing from year to year shows that it is
becoming a successful social media platform (Wasserman, 2013).
At the end of the day, the most
important factor for growing unique visitors is content. If the content is not
engaging and relevant to users, they are going to “bounce” and never come back
(“What’s more important:,” 2012).
References:
Hamel, S. (2008, January 08).
[Web log message]. Retrieved from
http://blog.immeria.net/2008/01/understanding-unique-visitors.html
Wasserman,
T. (2013, January 03). Report: Google has 105 million unique monthly
visitors.
Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2013/01/03/google-has-105-million/
What's
more important: Page views or unique visitors. (2012, July 18). Retrieved from
http://blog.agilitycms.com/whats-more-important-page-views-or-unique-visitors
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