Visits and Unique Visitor

A Unique Visitor is a metric in online marketing for the frequency of access to a website. Each Unique Visit can be assigned to an IP address and is counted only once, no matter how many times a single page is accessed or how many elements are downloaded during the visit period. In other words, the individual users who come to a page are counted.

For the visit, however, multiple visits by a unique visitor are counted, all visits are included in the count. For example, a unique visitor can have ten visits.

In order to obtain information about the number of visitors to a website in web analytics as part of online marketing or search engine optimization (SEO), so-called unique visitors and visits are counted. While the unique visitor—translated: the individual visitor—visits a website differently frequently within a certain period and is counted as one user, repeated visits by a user are counted accordingly during visits. In other words: The unique visitor counts the first visit of an internet user, regardless of how often they revisit the website afterward. The visit is counted each time. These visits are further divided into page impressions—meaning the number of page views within a website, within a certain period.

Tools of analytical services for determining visitors

The delineation of different terms alone causes confusion for many webmasters. But how can the different metrics be measured in reality and related to each other? For this, you need appropriate analytical services — for example, Google Analytics. These provide the corresponding data using different programs — including cookies. This text file is stored when a website is accessed. It contains data about the visited web pages as well as an anonymous ID, which is used to identify a browser — but not the user of the computer. When a user accesses the website again, the cookie registers that this browser has already accessed the homepage within a certain period. This is registered as a unique visitor, which in this case has triggered two visits and several page impressions.

Problem with cookies in measuring visits and unique visitors

First: Cookies are highly controversial in the online industry because, in the worst case, the text file provides a complete search profile of a person to an unknown recipient without the internet user being informed. When measuring Unique Visitors, another problem arises, resulting from the above: Many people do not allow their browsers to set cookies, which makes correct measurement impossible for the webmaster, as each visit is counted as unique. Furthermore, there are additional causes for inaccurate measurement data. For example, multiple people can use one computer but are always understood as one Unique Visitor. Additionally, one person can use multiple devices (e.g., computer, notebook, and mobile phone) or different browsers, leading to a distorted number. In one case, too few visitors are measured, and in the latter, too many. Currently, there are no feasible alternatives to circumvent the inaccuracy.