 Reading Jakob Nielsen’s great article today, ‘Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click’, got me thinking about delivering my first few training sessions when I was with ClickTracks. The reason for this was this heading: “Unique Visitors” Must Die.
Before joining ClickTracks, I felt that Unique Visitors were a pretty important, if not the most important, stat to pay attention to. But, I soon learned the error of my thinking. First of all, that metric, depending on which type of reporting you are using (log files vs. java script) tends to be wildly inaccurate (based on IP addresses in log files and cookies in java script).
But, accuracy aside, it is an even more misleading stat, as Jakob Nielsen explains, "Chasing higher unique-visitor counts will undermine your long-term positioning because you’ll design gimmicks rather than build features that bring people back and turn them into devotees and customers.”
The funny thing is that people don’t want to hear this. They want to believe that the Unique Visitor count, regardless of any other attribute (e.g. the fact that they leave the site immediately and never return), is the end-all, be-all metric. Countless times when reviewing the concept, ‘Don’t focus on Unique Visitors’, during the ClickTracks training sessions I was questioned, even challenged.
Here are the reasons why "Unique Visitors" is not a metric on which to base goals:
Tendency to be inaccurate
Some log file analyzers use IP address or IP address teamed with user agent to count a unique visitor. This over-counts when visitors return from a dial-up connection (new IP address) and under-counts when accessing a site from the same network (same IP address for many people).
Cookie Issues
We’ve all heard the debate of how often people do or don’t delete their cookies. This definitely impacts the validity of the unique visitor count. Worse than this, however, is when a site uses a persistent cookie to define a unique visitor, yet only sets a cookie on the homepage (believe me, this happens a lot).
The fire hose issue
Unless you have a fire hose filled with money to continually pour into pay-per-click and other online advertising - the odds of month over month significantly growing the number of unique visitors is extraordinarily slim.
But here’s the kicker…
Increasing your unique visitor count is actually counterproductive. By wanting to only grow the number of unique visitors, you are attracting useless traffic to your site. If these unique visitors don’t return, you essentially are paying - one way or another (pay-per-click, time spent optimizing your site, time spent creating content for your site) - for visitors who will never engage with your Web site nor start a conversation with your company, never encourage their friends to see your site, or purchase your products.
If Unique Visitors are not the key metric, then what is? This is a great question and can vary from site to site. But, it all boils down to being able to segment out key groups of visitors, such as:
Conversions
What are the business goals of your Web site? There should be more than one. Purchases are the most obvious conversion activities on an ecommerce site, but also important should be lead capture (getting someone’s email address and the permission to continue the conversation with them). Segmenting out visitors who convert can result in valuable behavior information and the ability to improve your site and increase conversions.
Return Visitors/Loyal Users
How many times do visitors return? How frequently? Following the paths of return visitors can give you great insight on the high impact sections of your site. Determining how often and how frequently they visit can give you great insight on when you need to be updating your content and broadening your inventory.
Word of Mouth Traffic
Are online or offline conversations driving traffic to your site? It is possible to break out the traffic that likely gets to your site from word of mouth. Once the traffic gets to the site, following their path will give you very interesting insight on what people are talking about.
High Quality Traffic
Visitors who spend significant time on your site (more than 20 seconds) are considered to be quality traffic. Once again, breaking out this visitor group and following their paths through your site is the only way to find out if they are sticking around because they are happy and finding what they want, or if they are hopelessly lost and ping-ponging back and forth through the same pages on your site.
It is well worth getting ‘unstuck’ from the single-focus mentality and take a much broader look at your Web site traffic, not only to get a better understanding of the important traffic but also to be able to improve the user experience.
###
About the Author
Joy Brazelle is director of product marketing and client services at ClearSaleing. She spends her days with her two professional passions - analytics and helping customers spend money more wisely by making informed decisions. Analytics has been her priority for over 10 years, helping clients build and grow their online presence. She has enjoyed the best of both the agency and the product worlds. Joy has also been a member of the Web Analytics Association since its launch in May 2006.
Related Resources:
|
