In the last installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we covered Visits. Today we’ll discuss Visitors.
Visitors are the number of unique individuals who view a website in a given time period. This differs slightly from the Visits metric in that it allows you to measure a website’s reach, as opposed to just its traffic. Visits measure the volume of traffic itself, but comparing this number to the number of visitors will help you understand what type of traffic your website is generating and what sorts of visitors you’re attracting. If you consider that one visitor can have multiple visits over a certain timeframe, you can begin to judge the quality of your visitors. For example, you can tell whether your site has a small group of die-hard fans who visit the site repeatedly and often, as opposed to just a bunch of casual visitors who stop in once for a peek but never return.
By tracking visitors and visits during a specific timeframe, you can also use this metric to measure the concentration or urgency of activity by repeat visitors. Therefore, the time period you look at can be an important factor in calculating this metric. If one visitor makes repeated visits to the site in the course of a day or two, you can bet that they’re seriously interested in your site — they may be doing research before they take the next step. These are good visitors to target and reach out to since their interest has been demonstrated by their repeat visits.
