September 10, 2010

Unique Visitors Isn’t The Best Single Metric

The web industry has been focused on unique visitors as the best single tracking metric.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had companies and people ask how many “uniques” a website I’m involved with gets per month.

For a long time I’ve wondered without doing too much deep thinking if unique visitors was really the metric we should be using as the baseline because uniques are not necessarily accurate when they’re based on IP address, and because isn’t there more value in one unique visitor coming to your site 30 times a month versus them coming once per month?  Doesn’t that say something positive about the site?

Luckily, Matt Belkin of Omniture does some in-depth analysis of unique visitors and suggests that “visits” is the metric we should be using.  Great thoughts Matt.

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Comments

  1. Ooglaser says:

    Nope, it isn’t the best way.. I have more likely 100 visitors doing 100 usd a day as 1000 visitors doing 50 usd.. ;)

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