The standard method for measuring visitors with most of the companies I work with is “unique visitors”. Most understand that there are inherent problems with measuring visitors (unique or otherwise) because of cookies, proxy servers, different definitions of unique (daily, weekly, monthly), etc. However, it seems that unique visitor (UV) has become the standard for companies that actively track their metrics.

The following post is from an Omniture company blog maintained by Matt Belkin. Omniture’s SiteCatalyst product is considered one of the top-tier packages for analytics/metrics tracking. Matt makes a strong case for NOT using UVs as the primary tracking methodology, instead using “visits.” His case for Visits includes:

1) Visits are more accurate than Unique Visitors.


2) Every Visit represents an opportunity to persuade or convert a visitor to a customer.


3) Measuring visits is based on fairly established industry standards

Read his post for all the details, it’s good info for any analytics package you may use and will help give you a better understanding of what the different methods are measuring and their accuracy. It certainly makes me think about how I measure traffic.

As a side note: If you’re still counting, or using the term, “hits” to measure traffic, you should better understand your metrics and/or think about upgrading your methodology.

Unique Visitors or Visits - which metric should you use? | Inside Web Analytics


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