I, along with countless others, was taught early on to ignore visits and focus on unique visitors as a leading indicator of your websites reach, i.e., the number of actual visitors your site attracts. Or, as many of us think of it, the number of potential prospects that visit our site. Matt Belkin of Omniture has a different take on this. He never uses unique visits. Instead he argues that visits is a more powerful metric as what it truly represents is conversion opportunities.
I think I agree. Why? Because, if a unique visit is considered the sum of the visits made during a single session and the visits represent the total number of pages viewed by a single visitor then it stands to reason that if a visitor didn’t purchase something, subscribe or inquire we didn’t fail to convert them one time, rather, we failed to convert them by the number of pages, and calls to action on those pages, that they were exposed to. When considered by this reasoning it provides a more revelatory picture of the effectiveness of our site.
The lesson that I garnered from Matt’s post was that we need to view each single page of our site as a conversion opportunity and the only way to measure the effectiveness of our site in converting customers is to establish visits rather than unique visitors as our principal metric.
You can read Matt’s post, “Unique Visitors or Visits – which metric should you use?” here. Do you agree?
