I had a great day at work today.  Not something many folks can say on a Monday.  But, I did.  I had a great conversation with a client about this topic today. A smart conversation with smart people.  And, at the end of the conversation, we were much happier about setting realistic goals.

I’ve mentioned before that Unique Visitors are not ‘everything’ after reading Jakob Nielsen’s article Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click (where he argues that the focus on the metric of ‘Unique Visitors must die’).

The reasons that Unique Visitors is not a metric to base goals on are:

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.

Related posts:

1. Unique Visitors are not everything…
2. Tracking Success on Content Sites – Part 1
3. Measuring Engagement and Usability
4. Step Away from the Data!
5. Don’t try this at work! 8 things NOT to do with your web analytics

Tags: Jakob Nielsen, pay per click, unique visitors, web analytics
Posted in Agency, Analytics, Audits, PPC | 1 Comment »