The Importance of Unique Visitors to your Website

Anyone with a website should use metrics to gauge the effectiveness of their layout, content, offers etc if they plan to be successful. Without knowing where the users have come from, what pages they visit, how long they spend on each page or what calls to action they engage in, then a site owner is significantly reduced in their ability to make effective changes.

Think of a brick and mortar retail store where they have different sections within the store. If they place certain items in one corner of the store and quickly realize that nobody is interested in those items, are they going to leave products there that don’t sell? I doubt it. They should, and would move the merchandise around and try new methods to attract the most attention.

Let's say your website received 10,000 hits in one month. Simple enough, right?  But wait; just in navigating a website a person is likely to visit the same page more than once. Maybe a single person visited your homepage several times in the course of their visit. Okay, so 10,000 hits isn't quite accurate enough. You need to know how many people came to your site, not just how many visits were recorded.

So it's several thousand people. But wait, how often did a person visit? It's one thing if they came back to the homepage multiple times in the span of an hour, but another matter entirely if they went to the homepage the next day. How long can a "duration of a visit," or a session, be defined? 

For that matter, how much time have people been spending on your site? Seconds? Minutes? Milliseconds? If it's the latter, then you're being visited by search engine spiders and bots, not people.

We want real human people and unique visitors. They can be either a first time visitor OR a returning visitor. Returning visitors are super because then you know that people liked what they saw first time around and have come back for more. If you have strong unique visitor stats then you are definitely doing something right.

Let’s take a look at Pinterest for a moment. For many, Pinterest is still a mystery, a stand-in for, “Some buzzy new social media site that I keep hearing about but don’t have time to figure out.” For investors, it’s a $2.5 billion jewel that leaps in value every couple of months.

Though common wisdom says that the company generates no revenue, rumors have long circulated that Pinterest makes more money than it, or its investors, care to admit. Representatives from comScore say that Pinterest hosted 53.3 million unique visitors in March, roughly double its traffic a year earlier. But just as important as growth is those users’ engagement with the site.

While 53 million unique visitors is impressive, let’s see how that ranks in comparison to the largest social network on the planet. Facebook ranks #1 and has 836.7 million unique a month! Wow is right. Where Facebook and Pinterest really break the bank is turning those unique visitors into highly engaged visitors that stick around and keep coming back. That’s the real importance of unique visitors; engaging them!