Unique visitors and why it is so important to consider them

Any business, regardless of what niche it is presented in, how long it has been operating on the market, strives to develop, retain the attention of regular customers, and attract new customers. To implement these ideas, diverse marketing strategies are developed, advertising and other activities are launched. But the final result of all these ideas does not always meet expectations and reflect the real picture of the state of the business. And in some cases, the problem is hidden in the fact that the specialists working on promoting your business do not take into account unique visitors.

Those who have been working in the field of Internet marketing for a long time, who specialize in SEO and SMM promotion, probably know how important it is to take into account the number of people visiting a site or other online platform for the first time. Thanks to this, you can avoid re-displaying ads and save advertising budgets, get the most accurate figures for audience growth, make timely adjustments to previously launched strategies to ensure the maximum result at the end.

As part of today's review, we will dwell in detail on what a unique visitor is and how it will differ from the total number of views, visits. We will tell you why it is important for a business to measure the number of such users and with the help of which services you can do this work as quickly and easily as possible. We will talk about the difficulties that you can face when determining unique users and how to correctly analyze the data obtained and use the results. We will provide a number of practical recommendations that will allow you to increase the number of such visitors in practice. The information provided will help you improve the efficiency of your own marketing strategies, thereby ensuring stable business development.

Who is a “unique visitor”

A Unique Visitor, also known as a unique visitor, is a specific user who has visited the site and is on it for a certain period of time. Here, the system records the activity of a specific person for the current period of time, be it 1 day, a week, a month or more. The activity itself means any event that was noted on the site or in the application. Alternatively, this could be an API data entry, a property entry, a response to an email newsletter, push notification in a mobile application, a click on a link, etc. The indicator only takes into account the number of people who viewed the content of the resource, regardless of how many times each of them visited the site.

You can determine the site's traffic using specialized tools. These are the so-called counters that are built into web analytics tools. They are able to collect and process even anonymous data, including:

• the type of browser from which the visit was made;
• the geolocation of the user device;
• the IP-address of a personal computer, laptop or smartphone, tablet;
• cookies, etc.

The counters of such services read this combination and remember it, forming the so-called unique identifier user ID, which will ultimately allow them to distinguish one person from another and calculate the site's traffic. But the "unique visitors" indicator will not always reflect the actual number of people who visited the site. In some cases, the system can count the same user several times. In particular, this can happen if a person clears cookies through their browser settings, connects to the same resource from another device or browser, or decides to use a proxy server or VPN. You also need to understand that in practice, different people can use the same device. And it turns out that if the settings are not changed, the system will perceive all their connections as one.

That is, we would like to immediately draw your attention to the fact that all services that provide an option to calculate unique visitors can provide data with an error. In addition, the definition of such users is directly related to the time interval you choose. Alternatively, if you set 1 day, then a person who visits your site today and then goes to it tomorrow will be counted by the system as a new one, that is, as a unique visitor. As you can see, there are a number of nuances in this issue. And this means that they need to be looked into in more detail.

Unique visitor, total number of visits and views: what are the differences

In order to get the most accurate figures in practice, it is necessary to clearly understand what parameter we are talking about and not to confuse it with other fairly similar characteristics. The fact is that the total number of sessions will increase significantly as users repeatedly visit the same site. That is, one unique visitor can visit your resource an unlimited number of times, but all of his repeated connections should no longer be taken into account by analytics tools. Along with such a parameter as “unique visitor”, marketers, various services and agencies also operate with such indicators as “views” and “visits”. At the same time, they are often confused with unique visitors, which we are talking about today. In order to avoid such mistakes in the future, you must clearly understand what the difference is between them and be able to classify them correctly. In particular:

1. Unique visitor. This is a user of a specific personal device that does not clear cookies. Based on this parameter, you can roughly understand how many real people visited your resource over a certain period of time. That is, you can estimate how many potential customers are attracted by each of the traffic sources you use.
2. View. Here we are talking about the direct loading of a specific page of the site. That is, this is one completed action. It turns out that if the same person goes, say, to 5 pages of your site, then he will be counted as one unique visitor who has made 5 views. Based on this indicator, you can determine how interesting your site and the information presented on it are to the target audience, and also help control the stability of the resource. If it turns out that in a certain period of time the number of views has sharply decreased, then there is a high probability of service failures. In practice, view indicators are mainly used for multi-page sites.
3. Visit. This term means absolutely any human activity on one resource for a specified time interval. By default, most analytics services take a 30-minute period as a basis, but you can always change it if you wish. That is, this is already a series of actions as a variant of downloads for viewing events performed by the same person for a certain period. Based on this criterion, the level of loyalty of the consumer market is determined. If it turns out that the number of visits is significantly greater than the number of unique visitors, then we can draw conclusions about why people return to the resource again and actively use it, that is, a permanent audience has already been formed. Moreover, those pages that will attract more visits can be considered higher quality.

In the work of an Internet marketer, all these indicators are important, since they allow you to evaluate user activity, the depth of involvement, the quality of individual pages of the site, etc. But it is very important to classify them correctly and highlight them for yourself. This is the only way to get a clear picture of the effectiveness of the campaigns launched and make the necessary adjustments in a timely manner, increasing the effectiveness.

Why is it so important to know the number of unique visitors?

Accounting for the number of unique visitors in modern marketing is no longer a recommendation, but a rule that absolutely everyone who works in this niche should follow. Based on this indicator, you can:

• Evaluate the real audience of your online presence. Knowing the number of unique sessions, you can get a fairly accurate picture of how many different people are in contact with your resource. You will also be able to understand how popular the site is among the audience, in particular, whether it attracts new users.
• Conduct a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Thanks to knowledge of the unique visits indicator, you will be able to evaluate how well certain methods of attracting new visitors that you previously launched worked. Based on the information received, it will be possible to make adjustments to the marketing strategy, thereby increasing its effectiveness and justifying the investment.
• Increasing revenue from monetization. This aspect will be relevant for websites and businesses in general, whose profits are largely related to advertising. The fact is that advertisers are primarily interested in real coverage, that is, the number of unique visitors, and not the total number of visits. Knowing the number of unique users, you can get the most accurate picture of the current state of the market and set a reasonable price for a particular advertisement.
• Planning technical resources, in particular network bandwidth, server capacity, and even optimization of content. If you see that the number of unique users is constantly increasing, then you need to think about scaling your resource. Here we are talking about both its technical infrastructure, which ensures the fastest possible page loading and stable functioning, and about increasing the content that can interest visitors and hold their attention.
• Determining the indicators of user audience engagement. The fact that the indicators of new visitors will gradually increase is evidence of the correctness of the strategies launched and the decisions made. This means that your actions contributed to attracting new visitors, that is, in practice they turned out to be effective.

In parallel with determining the number of unique visitors to your site, it would be a good idea to also perform a comparative analysis with your closest competitors. This is what will allow you to understand whether the achieved results are so good, as well as to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your site, make appropriate adjustments, thereby increasing the efficiency of work.

Services for determining the number of unique visitors

Today, most of the services designed for web analytics already have a built-in counter of unique sessions or users by default. In particular, this solution is implemented in:

1. Google Analytics 4. One of the most popular analytical tools today, developed by Google. Provides users with a huge set of information, including behavioral user factors in relation to a particular site.
2. Yandex.Metrica. Another fairly common tool that allows you to analyze web traffic. This service is free to use, but at the same time it provides quite broad opportunities for collecting data about visitors, their preferences and behavior.
3. SimilarWeb. This service allows you to analyze both the business's website itself and competitors' resources. It is quite easy to use, although its functionality may be somewhat inferior to previous options.
4. Matomo. Many of you may have already heard of this service, as it was previously called Piwik. This web analytics platform has an open source code and provides fairly detailed information about the traffic going to the site.
5. Clicky. A service that provides information about the number of visitors and their behavior on sites in real time.
6. Adobe Analytics. A fairly professional tool designed for comprehensive data analysis, including tracking the number of unique visitors, analyzing their behavior on the resource.
7. Hotjar. A fairly advanced website usability analysis service. Provides a wide range of tools for analyzing visitor behavior on a specific resource. It also allows you to receive feedback and, based on it, optimize the resource in order to improve usability.
8. Woopra. A service designed to create detailed reports on user behavior, including what source they came from, what actions they perform on the site, how long they stay on a particular page, etc.

The first 3 services have received the greatest practical application. We will now dwell on how they work in more detail. But in any case, to launch the counter, you need to connect your site to one of the analytics systems. In this case, we are talking about installing a special tracking code on the site. Further work will directly depend on which service you have chosen for yourself.

How to find out the number of unique visitors through Google Analytics 4

To find out the number of unique visitors using Google Analytics 4, you need to do the following:

1. Run the service and go to the traffic reports. To do this, you need to follow this path: the tab “Life cycle”, then ““““““, and here select the option “Pages and screens”.
2. Specify the date range for which you want to receive statistical data.
3. In the results obtained, pay attention to such an indicator as “Users”. It will correspond to the number of unique visitors to your site.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that additional segmentation of users for analysis is provided directly above the report. By default, the service works with absolutely all users. If you want to find out data on a specific person, you will need to click on the corresponding one in the list identifier. After that, a new page will open in front of you, where information on a specific user will be presented, in particular, the exact date and source of the first visit, the type of device from which the transition was made, the date of the last connection, as well as a list of all pages and actions that were performed by a specific person. If necessary, you can additionally expand each of the sessions in order to see what actions were performed within them.

The user cards that Google Analytics 4 generates are quite similar to the client base of CRM systems, with the difference that here you will not have specific information about a person, that is, his name, contact information, transaction history. Here, the emphasis is on the user's activity on the site, in particular on what pages he viewed, what actions he performed, how many sessions he performed, etc.

How to find out the number of unique visitors through Yandex.Metrica

Initially, you need to create your own account in Yandex.Metrica and install the tracking code on your site, which we already discussed above. In the service itself, you create a new counter and specify the name of your site and its URL. Copy the resulting code and paste it into the HTML of your site immediately before the closing tag. Now you can collect data on all visitors to your resource, including unique ones:

1. Log in to your Yandex.Metrica account and select the appropriate counter. Next, find the “Reports” section in the left control panel and select the “Visitors” tab. This provides general information about visitors, including unique ones. The latter will be displayed in a table, in particular their number for a certain time interval.
2. Configure the time interval for which you will receive information, choosing the one that suits you from the proposed options: 1 day, 1 week, 1 month. This is also necessary so that you can perform a comparative analysis and see how much the number of unique visitors increases or decreases, thereby determining the effectiveness of launched advertising and marketing campaigns.
3. Analyze traffic sources. Yandex.Metrica allows you to identify users who come to your site from search engines including Google, Yandex, social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, VKontakte, via referral links and direct clicks. This is necessary in order to understand which sources provide the most traffic and perform appropriate optimization in order to increase the number of unique visitors.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that Yandex.Metrica also offers a set of additional tools that allow you to determine the engagement rates of the target audience, conversion rates, and analyze user routes. This is what will improve the user experience and improve the quality of content. If necessary, you can also integrate this service with other systems, including CRM, email marketing. Thanks to this, you will be able to track unique visitors through other channels of interaction with your business as well.

How to find out the number of unique visitors via SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a service that will allow you to find out not only the number of unique visitors visiting your site during a certain period of time, but also the total number of views, the average time a user spends on the site, and the number of pages that were viewed by a specific person. To find out this information, you need to do the following:

1. Go to the SimilarWeb service and enter the URL of your site in the corresponding window.
2. Go to the “Overview” tab, select the “Website Performance” option, and then click on “Engagement overview”.
3. In this case, we are interested in such a tool as “Monthly Unique Visitors”. It is this that indicates the number of unique users who have visited your site in the last month.

SimilarWeb will also be useful for marketers because it will help you find out the sources of traffic, namely how many people visited your site through search engines, via a direct link, from social networks and other channels. You will also see the countries and cities where the most active user audience is concentrated, thereby getting useful information for redistributing the advertising budget. And it is also very convenient that the service tracks the most popular keywords that users use when searching for certain products and services. This means that with the help of SimilarWeb you can get a lot of useful information that will be useful to you for promoting your own site and assessing the effectiveness of the work that has been launched.

Is there a standard for "unique visitors"?

How many unique visitors should your site attract per day, week, month? No one can answer this question unequivocally, since there are no standards regulating this parameter. Here everything depends on what market niche your business operates in, what site or service we are talking about, what audience it is focused on, how much money is invested in advertising, what promotion methods are used in practice and many other parameters.

It is clear that the more unique visitors come to your resource, the better. This means that your strategy turned out to be correct and working. But here it is also very important to take into account the target actions that visitors perform, because your business income directly depends on this. That is, you must understand that your advertising and other marketing activities do not just attract people, but stimulate them to buy goods and services.

We also recommend paying attention to the dynamics. If you see that the number of unique visitors to your site is gradually increasing, then you are moving in the right direction. If the opposite is true, then you need to identify the cause of this and fix the problem. Otherwise, you will simply spend money without receiving any material return. Out of curiosity, you can also check these indicators of your competitors to understand whether you are inferior to them in the results achieved or, on the contrary, surpass them.

Difficulties that may arise when counting the number of unique visitors

At the beginning of our review, we mentioned that the accuracy of determining the number of unique visitors leaves much to be desired, since it is influenced by a fairly large number of third-party factors. In particular, the most common difficulties of this process include:

• Browser caching. Each time a visitor enters a resource, the system records their visit. But if you decide to clear the browser cache, the cookies where this information is stored will also be automatically deleted. As a result, the system will no longer be able to identify the next visit as a repeat visit, since it will not have the corresponding information in its database. That is, such a repeat connection will be counted by the system as a new one.
• Visiting the site from different devices, browsers, IP addresses. When assigning an individual user ID to each user, the system is guided by a large number of parameters, including the browser type and IP address. If you connect to the same site from your home and work computer, smartphone, the counter will be triggered each time, recording the actions of one person as three unique ones. That is, the real results will be distorted.
• Blocking cookies. Today, there are already quite a lot of users who use privacy settings or special browser extensions that block cookies when working with the network. As a result, none of the analytics systems will be able to correctly track user data.

All these factors lead to errors in calculations, and quite serious ones. We must also not forget that errors can be made in tracking settings. Alternatively, incorrect settings of the tracking code on the site can also affect the accuracy of the results. This is why it is recommended to focus more on their dynamics rather than on the number of unique visitors coming to your site. That is, this is how you will see how effectively the strategy you launched is working.

Analyzing and using the results obtained

What should you do after you have information about the number of unique visitors to your site? It is very important to interpret them correctly. In particular, along with the direct number of new users, we also recommend paying attention to additional parameters, in particular:

• the total number of visitors to your resource;
• specifics of the target audience, including demographic data, the region from which most people come;
• the depth of interaction with your site, the number of pages viewed, etc.

This is the information that will help you correctly interpret the results obtained and understand which groups of users are showing greater activity, what types of content are most popular with a particular segment of the user audience. You will also be able to identify marketing channels, advertising campaigns that worked better than others and, accordingly, subsequently rely on them, getting the most with a minimum budget.

Also, the information received will help you prepare content that your audience will definitely appreciate, you will be able to improve the user experience and subsequently make the most informed decisions to achieve greater success. That is, you will understand the interests and preferences of your audience and promptly adjust your strategies to them.

Increasing the number of unique visitors: effective strategies

How can you increase the number of unique visitors? The following solutions can be used to implement such an idea:

1. Website promotion in search engines. Competent and thoughtful SEO is one of the key factors in the effective development of your resource as a whole, including increasing the number of unique visitors. Pay special attention to preparing the content, fill it with key queries, write meta tags. That is, here it is necessary to perform both internal and external optimization of the site, work with ranking factors. We would also like to draw your attention to the fact that all these actions must be performed constantly. Even if you get an ideal result, it must be maintained by adding new relevant content, a set of external link mass.
2. Promotion in social networks. Launch SMM for your business account on certain platforms and use them to announce new publications, maintain interest from the user audience, attract additional traffic to your site. Moreover, within the framework of social networks, you can launch targeted advertising, which will also contribute to an increase in the number of new visitors to your resource.
3. E-mail newsletter. This solution can be used to send potential clients information about the launch of new products, promotional offers, and also simply to maintain communications with the audience.
4. Contextual advertising. In terms of finance, such campaigns will be the most expensive, but you will see the results very quickly. Contextual advertising is launched in search results and will be displayed before the main results after users enter a particular query. That is, it is aimed directly at people who are obviously interested in your products or services. And while you are investing in such an advertising campaign, new unique users will visit your site.
5. Check the effectiveness of the launched advertising campaigns and optimize them. This is what will allow you to focus directly on the target audience, prevent excessive spending by disabling those channels and regions that do not give the desired results in practice.
6. Interact with the audience. The fact that you will prepare interesting and relevant content is very good, as it will attract the attention of new customers and retain the attention of regular ones. But it is also very important to add interactivity to your interaction with the audience. It will be problematic to implement something like this through the website, so it is recommended to use social networks, instant messengers. This will increase the engagement and loyalty rates. Visitors will repost your publications, the content will be included in the recommendations, which will lead to an increase in coverage.

In any case, your actions should be carried out under constant control. You should see which strategies work, which fail, and immediately make appropriate adjustments. That is, it is very important for you to monitor the dynamics of attracting unique visitors, as well as monitor conversions.

Let's summarize

A unique visitor is one of the extremely important parameters that must be taken into account when working with a website, in the process of its promotion in search results and more. Based on it, you will see how much your resource attracts the attention of the audience, holds its attention, which will directly indicate development. Today, there are quite a lot of different services for measuring this indicator. We have described the most common and convenient ones in detail above.

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