If you’re a well-polished webmaster, you very well know that nothing is juicier than having unique visitors to your site traffic. Visitor tracking is essential for any business to capture key information and details about its website performance. Any business large or small can benefit from being aware of how customers are behaving on their website.
Tracking also allows webmasters to optimize their sites to convert visitors into leads. In addition, by tracking your site visitors, you can collectively conduct a clean audit of your site. Such as using tracking sources to audit your marketing. Furthermore, you’d want to make sure you’re spending your money where it really counts.
In other words, tracking your visitors can provide important information about marketing campaigns and web page content. And as a result, you’ll easily learn where to funnel your marketing funds correctly. With the help of analytics that shows you exactly what appeals to the customer.
What Are Unique Visitors?
Unique Visitors refer to the number of individuals who visited a website or a set of web pages in a given time period. For example, one person visiting multiple times throughout the day is counted as one unique visitor. The difference between visits and unique visitors is quite simple. Visit refers to every person who visited your website in the reporting period.
If one person visits the website 5 times, it’ll count as 5 visits. A unique visitor, on the other hand, refers to a distinct individual user who visited your website in the reporting period. More specifically, unique visitors are only counted once no matter how many times they return to the website. In general, you will always have more visits than unique visitors.
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On Google Analytics, ‘unique visits’ are labeled as ‘users’ whilst ‘visits’ are labeled as ‘sessions’. The good news is that most web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Yandex. Metrica all measure this as one of the metrics.
And whilst they all have different labels for this metric, the underlying definition remains the same. To measure your unique visitors, you’ll simply need to select one of the web analytics tools, install it on your website, and start tracking.
Why is it Important to Track your Site Visitors?
Given that all factors are constant, the web visitors tracking journey we take for our website can be a daunting task that is often neglected. Unfortunately, though, you could be making a big mistake if you are not tracking visitors on your website.
In general, visitor tracking is critical to the proper and successful function of your business. It can help you improve your content strategy for starters. You may also better optimize your design and even generate leads! It’s important to remember that just because something works for a similar business in your sector, it doesn’t mean it will work for your business.
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Therefore, you shouldn’t rely only on external data and campaign statistics to gauge your marketing efforts and improve your website. And as such, you may need to boost your website (content, design, user experience, etc.).
More so, in order to attract more visitors. Visitor tracking is the first place you should look to get started. So, why is it so important that you track your site visitors? Let’s consider a few example scenarios below:
1. Sourcing Traffic & Rankings
Perhaps the number one reason businesses perform visitor tracking on their websites is to gain a better understanding of where their traffic is coming from. Find out which search engines are sending traffic to your site. Also, gain key insights by determining which traffic comes from which links and from which sources.
You can use this information to increase your online presence where your visitors are most active and interested. What about the top ten rankings or SERPs? With visitor tracking, you can easily learn more about your top landing pages. Something that feels right to you may not be working for your customers in terms of page content.
Track your top ten pages so you can learn what your customers like. Rearrange your top ten pages according to your customer’s interest to reflect the most important details about your business. Offer ways for customers to connect with you.
2. Site Evaluations for Conversions
Just as with your top ten pages, you should be reviewing your entire website with visitor tracking to gain a better understanding of your customers’ likes and dislikes. Evaluating your website for content that draws more business can greatly improve your content strategies. Likewise, allowing your customers to ‘leave’ can have a great impact on your evaluation process.
This gives you the opportunity to incorporate the content that customers are looking for into your website, thoroughly. What about conversion ratings? Find out how many customers are actually making purchases. See which type of customer responds to social media. How many visitors sign up for email or newsletters?
Set up goals and track how many visitors reach the goal. When you’re tracking the customers on your website, you’re more involved with them at other levels. Analytics can provide pertinent details relating to customer preferences, purchases, and feedback. You can also track the success or failure of a social media marketing campaign or your pay-per-click (PPC) efforts.
3. Customers Behavior & Leads
Based on tracking results, you can also learn just exactly who is visiting your website and why. Is the visitor male or female? How old are they? Where do they live and work? Analytics can track and provide this information. Search Engine Optimization and local online and mobile ads, as well as social media group campaigns, are great ways to use.
Particularly, in order to target traffic from a specific location. Utilize your tracking results to accurately and precisely facilitate these orders. What about leads generation? Tracking your visitors is a good source of leads, too. Once you understand your customer’s wants and needs based on the results of their searches, you can better cater to their needs on your landing pages.
Make sure your keywords match your content and learn which keywords convert to increase sales more rapidly. Visitor tracking provides a unique source of lead generation.
4. Find Errors to Win Referrals
What if your website is running with errors or defects? This could affect how many visitors are coming to your pages and influence whether or not they decide to stay or come back. You can easily find things that have gone wrong on your website when you’re using analytics because you’ll notice the difference in traffic to those pages.
A dip in traffic on a particular page could mean that the page is not loading correctly, so you might need to solve any pending issues. You can also win more referrals if you fix your notable site errors. Similar to sourcing traffic, tracking visitors provides a unique look at where your traffic is coming from when it is being referred from other sources.
Use this information to gain rapport with your customers when you link your site back to these referred sources so that your customers can find you easily.
5. Exit Pages & Bounce Rates
Learn how many times a customer visits your site, and the time spent on your website before they leave. Using analytics you can see the customer journey on your website, which shows how many and which pages were visited and for how long. When you know more about which customers are staying and leaving, you’ll have a better idea about various things.
Such as how to design your website to provide a better User Experience (UX) in the end. Improve your content strategy and links on your site pertaining to what your customers like or don’t. What about your site bounce rates? You want to keep your bounce rates low since this has become a ranking factor for Google.
This is the rate at which visitors are coming to your site and immediately leaving or never making it past the first page. This information is crucial for conversion tracking and keeping a tally distance between those bouncing visitors and those that actually stay longer on your site.
How To Identify Unique Visits In Google Analytics
It’s important to realize, that search engine tracking tools use visitors’ IP addresses, Browser Cookies, Registration IDs, and User Agents to identify unique visitors. In general terms, these are called Identifiers. As soon as a visitor lands on your website or blog, these analytical tools track the data and record it within the panel.
Every user generates sessions that help website owners to understand user behavior. But, please note that a single user could create multiple sessions. While navigating the website or blog, users explore multiple pages which creates multiple sessions. For instance, in order to identify unique visits in the Google Analytics tool, you can follow the given steps below.
Identifying unique visits in Google Analytics:
- First, open your Google Analytics account,
- Secondly, click on the Audience tab from the left-hand side menu,
- Again, choose Overview as your item of interest,
- Lastly, set the Date Range (from when till when you want the data).
That’s how you could get an overview of new visitors to your web. However, in order to analyze the behavior and deep understanding, you can explore the audience section in the Google Analytics tool. All you need to do is click on “Behavior” and choose “New vs. Returning” under the audience report menu.
And by so doing, you’ll get all the data that you seek. You can adjust the dates to shrink or broaden the data. If you would explore the audience report, you can actually do a better analysis of your site users’ behavior. You can also identify unique visitors by doing regular traffic checks under acquisition.
All you’ll need to do is, click on “Acquisition” in the top left menu choose “All Traffic” and then select “Source/Medium”. The moment you get the report, you will get a column name “New Users”. And along with users, you can get detailed traffic reports under this option.
Why Do Unique Visitors Matter?
Among many other reasons, it’s particularly important to know your unique visitors for a couple of reasons. But, these reasons will vary based on several factors. Such as your marketing goals or your type of business. While looking at the total number of visitors to your website is great, looking at unique visitors reveals a lot more information.
As I mentioned earlier, unique visitors are those who request pages from your website, regardless of how often or not they visit the site. With this information, you can make better decisions about content strategies for those specific pages or those specific customers. Or both. So, why does it matter?
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First of all, unique visitors tell you the actual size of your audience. For example, one person can visit a website 3x per day. In this case, if there’s an ad on the website, it means the same person will see it three times. This might be a good metric for a news website selling ad impressions among many other useful performance metrics.
However, this may not be a metric a SaaS website may be interested in. This is because they may be interested in getting more people to sign up for their product. In this case, the number of unique visitors they attract would paint a much clearer picture of how well their marketing campaigns are doing.
Secondly, it can also help you understand your customers’ behavior. For example, if your visitors continue to return to your website, it could be a sign that they enjoy your content or what you’re serving on the site. On the other hand, if you notice you have a lot of unique visitors but not returning visitors, it could mean something is wrong with the site.
You could then investigate and fix the issue. Overall, your site’s unique visitor tracking provides an accurate picture of the size of the audience you’re reaching.
Page Views vs. Unique Visitors — Which One Matters Most?
A page view is triggered when any page is loaded by any visitor to your site. For example, if you click on a link and the page loads, you have triggered a page view. If you click the link 20 times today, it will count as 20 page views.
Pageviews are important for publishers because each page view tallies an ad impression for each ad on the page. If your ads are sold on a cost-per-thousand views (CPM) basis, this is an important number for you to grow. But, it’s so tempting to make sacrifices to the user experience in order to increase page views.
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For example, an image gallery that loads each new image seamlessly provides a better experience for the user but will cut down on page views. It’s important to find a balance so you don’t alienate your audience. The unique visitors metric gives you a sense of the size of your audience.
The relative importance of this depends on the purpose of your site or publication. If you are a brand, you may want to maximize the number of people that come to your site. With little regard for how many pages they access, as long as they follow your chosen path through the site.
If you are a niche publisher, you may not have a huge audience, but they may show loyalty and engagement by clicking deep into the site and generating page views.
You Need To Watch Your Bounce Rates!
At the end of the day, the most important factor for growing your page views and unique visitors is content which most web marketers say is king. If your content is not engaging and relevant to your users, they are going to “bounce” and never come back. The “bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors who come to your site and leave within a few seconds.
A high bounce rate indicates that visitors didn’t like what they saw or didn’t find what they were looking for. Equally important, the amount of time spent on the page indicates whether users are actually reading or watching what you’re serving up. The higher the average time on a page, the more engaged your audience is on that particular page.
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Therefore, as a publisher, increasing this metric provides great leverage to you. As you try to increase your ad rates because the ad impression time is longer. So, let’s consider between page views and unique visitors — which one should you focus on? Well, it all depends on your objectives and audience.
Finally, I know you might feel that there is so much to do and you don’t know where to start! But, you don’t have to go at it alone. We can help you set up and configure the best tools to track your website visitors. And also to convert your site visitors into leads.
All you’ll need to do is Contact Us whenever you’re ready so that we take your website tracking to the next level! You can also share some of your additional thoughts or questions in our comments section.
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