When assessing the reach of your website or your marketing campaigns, there are a few key metrics you should pay attention to. One of these metrics is called “unique visitors.”
If your business is dedicating resources to an online marketing campaign, you need to be able to measure the success of your marketing campaign.
Anytime a business invests resources into an online marketing campaign, that business should be able to learn about its customer’s typical website user behavior as well as how well the campaign is boosting the business’s bottom line.
Working with a top SEO agency, like Digital Logic, makes it even easier to assess the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
Our marketing team consistently monitors your website user behavior to gain a comprehensive understanding of what’s working and what’s not. By using the latest data-extraction and marketing tools, such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, etc., our digital marketing experts can monitor your campaign’s progress, identify areas for improvement, and provide the best ways to move forward, for any given period.
To learn more about what our digital marketing team can do for your business, schedule a call with one of our skilled strategists and get your free SEO audit.
What Are Unique Visitors?
We’re often asked, “What is ‘unique visitor?” and “What does “unique visits” have to do with my online marketing campaign?” While we, as marketers, understand the importance of website user behavior and how the typical, unique visitor contributes to your marketing data, we understand that this metric probably sounds funny to those who aren’t engrossed in the marketing landscape day in and day out.
“Unique visitor” is a metric that calculates the number of new users visiting a page or a set of web pages in a given time period, regardless of how often they requested the pages.
How many unique visitors view your site is different from the number of visits, however.
Difference Between Website Visits and a Unique Visitor
There is a simple difference between unique visitors and user visits. A website visit counts every user who visited the website in the reporting period.
If one unique user visits a website two times, it will count as two visits. And if one unique user visits a website multiple times, it will count as multiple visits.
Unique visitors are counted once, regardless of how many times they return to the website. All new visitors count only once, regardless of the number of times they visited a website.
For example, one unique visitor can provide the website with two visits or even multiple visits, but the unique user will only be counted as one unique visitor for that selected time period.
So, one unique visitor can visit the same web page multiple times and be counted once, while “number of visits” tracks the specific number of times that each unique user requested the page within the selected time period.
Why You Should Track Unique Visitors
Tracking unique visitors is vital in measuring your website’s success. Understanding the number of unique visitors your website receives within a selected time period can provide a better insight into your audience, improve lead generation, and increase revenue.
If you’re not tracking your unique visitors already, there’s no time like the present to start.
So, what specific insight can measuring unique visitors give you about your website?
First, the number of unique visitors shows how big your website’s audience actually is, within any given time period. Multiple visits from the same user can distort the true number of different people who are visiting your website.
Next, the number of unique visitors provides insight into the behavior of your potential and returning customers.
Maybe you have a significant number of returning visitors. This can be an indicator that your site has high-quality content that keeps bringing website visitors back.
Conversely, maybe you notice that you have a good number of unique visits but not a high number of returning visitors. In this case, maybe there’s an issue on your site.
This can signal that something needs to be fixed or changed, which you can then do to increase visitor returns.
Data From Unique Visitors
Tracking the number of distinct individuals that visit your website is key to understanding the:
- true size of your audience
- effectiveness of your content marketing strategy
- the success of your marketing campaign
- number of ad impressions you’re getting
Professional marketers understand that they can use the unique visitor metric to identify areas on the website that need improvement and swiftly make those needed changes. This can increase repeat visits, attract more visitors, and even decrease the bounce rate on your site.
Learn more about KPIs and metrics
Benefits of Analyzing Unique Visitors
Digital marketing specialists use a plethora of different metrics to track and evaluate the relative successes of their Internet marketing campaigns, including website visitors and visits. The unique visitor metric is just as useful as other metrics, such as page views, conversion rate, CTR, CPM, and web traffic sources. Analyzing your unique visitors is beneficial in several ways.
Learn how to calculate cost per thousand.
Below, you’ll find some of the most important benefits of analyzing your unique visitors.
Better Understanding of Your Audience
Understanding your audience is crucial if you want to know the true reach of your marketing campaigns. Tracking the unique visitor metric can show you how many of those visitors are seeing your site for the first time or how many visits are required before a user decides to make a purchase.
Increase in Revenue
If you have an e-commerce site, the unique visitor metric can show you how many visitors are purchasing your products or services for the first time. With this information in mind, you can adjust your digital marketing efforts to reach new users.
Better Lead Generation
If you understand the number of unique visitors, you can adjust your lead generation campaigns to target different audiences and generate more leads.
Improving SEO Strategy
Tracking the number of distinct individuals that visit your website during any given period can also help improve your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
You can identify which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website and place more emphasis on them, which in turn, helps you improve your SEO strategy.
Better Campaign Management
If you have multiple active digital marketing campaigns, tracking unique visitors can help you understand which of those campaigns are the most effective. You can also use this information to adjust your campaigns and ensure that your website is targeting the right audiences and in turn, visits.
Want to learn more about digital marketing metrics? Check out these posts:
How to Track Unique Visitors
There are a few different ways to track unique visitors.
Track Unique Visitors Using Cookies
Since most marketers understand the importance of tracking unique visitors, they’ll use cookies to capture this website data.
A cookie is a tiny piece of data that’s stored on a user’s computer when the user visited a website. This data can be used to track the user’s movements through the Internet.
Track Unique Visitors Using IP Addresses
You can also track unique visitors through the use of IP addresses. Any device that connects to the Internet has a unique IP address and can be used to identify distinct individuals visiting your website.
Track Unique Visitors Using Analytics Tools
There are also several web analytics tools that measure the number of unique visitors you receive. Some examples of these tools include:
Most marketers use Google Analytics, as it provides the most reliable data for each selected time period.
We provide more info here: Monitor Web Traffic
How Many Unique Visitors Should Your Website Get?
The number of unique visitors your website should get during any given reporting period depends on your industry, your audience, and the scale of your business.
For example, if you provide high-value commissioned art pieces for prominent collectors, then your website should get fewer unique visitors than someone offering $1 digital prints. If you sold each custom art piece for $10,000, you’d need 10,000 unique visits (that actually purchase) for your digital print business to equal the one unique visitor that purchased your custom art piece.
But we know you didn’t come here for the story. You came here for the bottom line. The rule of thumb for the average small business is 1,000 unique visitors per month.
However, it’s better to invest in marketing techniques that target higher-quality website visitors than to blindly target all of the visitors your website can handle.
Where Do Your Website Visitors Come From?
When you understand where your website visitors are coming from during any given time period, you can better determine where your marketing budget should be spent in the future.
Look into paid media vs earned media.
There are several traffic sources for website visitors, including the following:
- Organic search results
- Direct search results
- Social media
- Display ads
- Email marketing
- Paid search
- Referrals
What Is Your Industry Standard For Unique Visitors?
SEO tools, such as AhRefs, SEMRush, or Google Analytics, can help you determine what “good” visitors look like for your specific industry. These tools help evaluate your competition’s traffic. You can see how many unique visitors land on their website, and then you can compare these data points to your own data.
Once you establish your industry standard, you can have a better understanding of whether your website is on target for unique users.
How Is Your Content Marketing Strategy?
If your website isn’t getting enough visitors, then you need to invest in professional content marketing services from a reputable digital marketing agency, like Digital Logic. Content marketing is a crucial part of any good digital marketing strategy.
At Digital Logic, our professional marketing team monitors your content to ensure that the content is ranking for the correct keywords. This helps ensure that we are appealing to the ideal unique visitor that your business needs to thrive.
The better your content marketing strategy, the more website visitors your business will attract.
Ready To Get More Website Visitors?
When it comes to building and maintaining a successful website, it can be incredibly difficult to accomplish on your own.
At Digital Logic, we simplify the marketing process and help grow businesses exponentially by harnessing the power of SEO, PPC management services, and data.
If your goal is to increase website visitors, grow your customer base, or increase revenue, our marketing strategies can help get you there. Our SEO professionals are here to help you develop and execute a personalized strategy that works for your business – not just a one-size-fits-all solution.
