When you analyze a website, in terms of traffic, you have to pay attention especially to two things, namely, the visits and the unique visitors of your website. Of course, they are not one and the same thing.
The visits represent the number of times your website has been accessed, during a period of your choice. This metric might be misleading to new website managers or bloggers, for example, as they believe each visit corresponds with a unique visitor.
However, it is not like that. One visitor can do multiple visits to your website – multiple times a day, a week, a month. Therefore, a unique visitor is that visitor that has visited a webpage at least one time during a set period of time; only the visitor’s first contact with the website is taken into account.
Are the Numbers Correct?
Many people wonder if the statistics displayed on their website’s admin page are correct, especially in terms of unique visits. Of course, when you own a website or a blog, you’d rather know how many people visited your website, and not if only one person checked every single page of it.
The number of unique visitors you usually see may or may not be correct – why? It is because there will be some users that will access your website from different devices, over different IPs.
For example, someone might check your website while at work, then visit it again at home, and then maybe visit it once more on his or her way to work, via their mobile device. This will give your statistics a number of three unique visitors – when there’s actually just one.
Moreover, the unique visitors are also traced depending on browser and tracking cookies. Therefore, if one of your users changes the browser they’re using or clears its cookies, then you will have some extra unique visitors added to your statistics.
Why are Unique Visitors Important?
The Unique Visitors metric is important to a website because its owner can see how many times a certain user returns to the website.
For example, if you have a website that’s selling services or products and there are users that return repeatedly but do not make a purchase then you might consider looking into your offers and pricing. Why?
It is because this signals you that the unique user is in a research phase and is thinking of buying your product or service – but the process is not completed because your website might either lack information or your product/ service might be too expensive.
The Bottom Line
Analyzing your website’s unique visitors, as well as the number of visits overall, can give you information on what your website is missing in order to increase its conversion rate.
Moreover, you could also interpret these metrics in a variety of ways – if there is a certain discrepancy between the number of visits and the number of unique visitors, or there are visitors that switch between pages very fast then you can safely assume that your website might need a makeover, to make things easier for your users.
The number of unique visitors may be big, but if the conversion rate is not almost directly proportional to it, then your website might need to go through some changes.