Total Or Unique Visitors, What Is the Difference?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

New webmasters might be confused about the difference between visitors and unique visitors in your analytics program. If you’re not sure which metric is the more important of the two then perhaps you need to spend a little more time analyzing your traffic. Your Visitor count is the total number of visitors in the reporting period you are observing. Unique visitors is the number of visitors who have visited your site for the first time. Which is the more important metric for your site depends a lot on your site’s mission and your goals, but for most website owners, both metrics tell a story. Total visitor count is an important metric because it tells you precisely how many people who have been on your website. That’s important for determining your conversion rate. 1,000 visitors resulting in 100 sales equals a 10% conversion rate. You can build from that.

Unique visitors are important too, however. Most visitors will not purchase on the first visit. If you have a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitors then that means you are not getting many repeat visitors. That could be a telling sign that your content is not compelling enough. It could also mean that you are losing opportunities to convert traffic and close sales. Maybe your calls to action need work or you are losing visitors somewhere else within your sales pitch. Whatever the case, a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitor count means that most of your site visitors are not returning.

Measuring traffic is not all about raw numbers. It’s about reaching the right target market. And if you have a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitor count, it could be because you are not reaching the right target market. Maybe you need to target other keywords as part or your search engine optimization efforts or create better, stickier content to engage your visitors better to keep them coming back to your website.

Hopefully this will give you some helpful tips into the relationship between your total visitors and unique visitors. Knowing how to analyze your traffic numbers can go a long way to knowing how to solve your online problems and can help you craft a long term strategy for future success.