Unique Visitors Isn’t The Best Single Metric

March 30th, 2006

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.

• What’s Next in Measurement
• Quantcast Releases Video and Widget Measurement
• Is Time Spent the Answer?
• Blog Audience Measurement at the Blog Business Summit
• ClickTale Launches Heatmaps

Entry Filed under: Random, Web Analytics