Importance of Unique and Repeat Visitors
Keeping track of unique visitors helps determine effectiveness of marketing strategies. Webopedia explained that the term unique visitor “refers to a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time.” It may be difficult to determine the exact number of unique visitors a site may have. PC Magazine explained, “Unique visitors are determined by the number of unique IP addresses on incoming requests that a site receives, but this can never be 100% accurate. Depending on configuration issues and type of ISP service, in some cases, one IP address can represent many users; in other cases, several IP addresses can be from the same user.”
How important are unique visitors? Check out Unique Visitors are not everything. In this article, the author points out that it may be a “misleading stat, as Jakob Nielsen explains, Chasing higher unique-visitor counts will undermine your long-term positioning because you’ll design gimmicks rather than build features that bring people back and turn them into devotees and customers.”
There seems to be confusion between unique visitors and repeat visitors in some of the articles on the Internet. In the article Defining Unique Visitors by Imediaconnection, Brant Dainow explained, “Understanding your repeat visitors is where the money is. The reason is simple: it takes an average of 2.4 visits to your site before someone will buy. In other words, most people buy on the second or third visit to your site. No one buys the first time they visit. Repeat visitors are the ones who matter. Repeat visitors buy the products, and therefore repeat visitors pay your bills.”
Statista created an infographic that demonstrates unique visitors per month as well as average monthly use per visitor for sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, MySpace, Google, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Not only does Facebook far exceed all others in unique visitors, users are spending over 6 hours per month on the site. This is over 600 times the amount of time spent on Google+.
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Uli 6:32 am on March 26, 2012 Permalink |
Hello,
great article. I allways use the WAA’s ( now DAA) definition of a visitor. As we try to target humans -. It makes sense to count humans as visitors.
Sadly enough we can only count computers or browser instances – which comes close enough to the number of humans that visit a particular site.
I have written an article about this on http://www.gradlinig.com/2012/02/was-ist-ein-unique-besucher-bzw-unique-visitor/ . Sorry at the moment this is only available in german, but Google tranlsate might do a good job.
The number of unique visitors is a measure for the number of people that you can reach with your site – so generally more is better.
Returning visitors are even better as they are a measure for the number of people that are really interested in your message.