Unique Visitors Vs Total Visitors – Which is More Important?

Are you tracking the visitors to your website?
What is the total and unique number of visitors?
Which is more important?

If you’re not tracking how many people are visiting your website and where they are coming from it will be difficult to measure your site’s growth and understand why it’s happening. To achieve this you need to utilize the statistics software usually included with your web hosting plan (e.g. awstats) or install Google Analytics Code on your web pages.

Sept 2011 Stats

What are unique visitors?

This is the number of people who have visited your site for the first time. For example in the above graphic the number of unique visitors for DrostDesigns.com in September 2011 was 33476.

What are total visitors?

This is the total number of visitors in the reporting period you are observing which includes repeat visitors. For example in the above graphic the total number of visitors (visits) for DrostDesigns.com in September 2011 was 95661.

Which is more important?

Total visitor count is an important metric for determining your conversion rate. For example if 1,000 visitors results in 100 sales that equals a 10% conversion rate.

Unique visitors is also an important metric because most visitors won’t purchase on their first visit. If you have a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitors it means you are not getting many repeat visitors.

This could mean your content is not compelling enough or you are losing opportunities to convert traffic into sales. Perhaps your calls to action need to be improved.

How to get repeat visitors

One highly effective method for getting visitors to return to your website is to use an autoresponder to send a regular newsletter and/or a series of follow-up messages. Every time you send a newsletter or email message invite your customers to check out the new content or products you’ve added.

Another effective technique is to utilize your blog and social media sites. Every time you add a new article to your blog announce it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social sites by linking to your web page. Encourage them to leave comments.

Repeat visitors will help increase search engine rankings and improve sales. Make a plan to increase both unique visitors and total visitors because they are both important for the success of your website.

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Comments

  1. amazing post. most of the people thinks that unique visitors is the more important than repeat visitors. Can you explain how to link social media with my site?

  2. Forgot the code…here it us…


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