A unique visitor is an individual user who has accessed an organization’s website. It is determined by the internet protocol (IP) address of a device or computer that the user is browsing from, combined with a cookie on the browser they are using. It doesn’t matter how many visits a visitor makes, if they are on the same device and browser, only one unique visitor is counted. For example, if you visit rareperson.com, you will be counted as a unique visitor. If you come back to this website five more times, in a defined time set for the site, you are still counted as one unique visitor. If you visit the site from another computer, or it will count you as a new visitor. Because the website is monitoring the IP address, the downside of unique visitors is that a single user could visit a site from five different IP addresses and be counted as five unique visitors. Also, different users accessing the same machine/same IP address would be counted as one user when accessing a website.
As a side note, an IP address “is a logical numeric address that is assigned to every single computer, printer, switch, router or any other device that is part of a TCP/IP-based network. The IP address is the core component on which the networking architecture is built; no network exists without it. An IP address is a logical address that is used to uniquely identify every node in the network. Because IP addresses are logical, they can change. They are similar to addresses in a town or city because the IP address gives the network node an address so that it can communicate with other nodes or networks, just like mail is sent to friends and relatives” (techopedia.com, n.d).
As a marketer, you want to grow your website and attract new audiences. When you look at your analytics, a website’s unique visitors is one of the most prominent numbers to analyze. This metric gives you a sense of how many individuals are visiting your website and gives some key information, depending on the type of website.
If you are an e-commerce website, then you want to get as many visits to your website to make purchases as possible. The number of unique visitors will help you to gauge how many people are coming to your site. An increase in unique visitors is a good indicator that the website is working. Marketers can then verify where that traffic is coming from and do more of what’s increasing traffic. There is also the opposite if you see that your unique visitors are decreasing you can pinpoint what led to this occurring.
As an example, Facebook received millions of unique visitors in the United States from April 2011 to July 2015. In those months, "there were approximately 163.69 million US users visiting the social networking site. As of the second quarter of 2015, Facebook's worldwide user's numbers were confirmed to be approximately 1.49 billion, making it the most popular social network worldwide” (Statisa, n.d).
Though social websites may not need users to make purchases, they want as many unique visitors as possible in order to monetize their success.
References:
Web Analytics Association (2008). Web Analytics Definitions. Retrieved from: http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitions.pdf
Statista (n.d). Number of unique U.S. visitors to Facebook between April 2011 and July 2015. Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265831/number-of-unique-us-visitors-to-facebookcom/
techopedia.com, (n.d). Internet Protocol Address (IP Address). Retrieved from: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/2435/internet-protocol-address-ip-address
Valela, A. (2016). What’s More Important: Page Views or Unique Visitors? (n.d.). Retrieved from http://blog.agilitycms.com/content-managers/what-s-more-important-page-views-or-unique-visitors
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