A new business owner with a newly launched online presence may find the terminologies used in Marketing for website traffic analysis confusing if not overwhelming. The good news is I’m here to help! Starting off by answering the question, “What is a unique visitor to a website?”

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the basics of website analytics that I’ll be discussing in this post. Not only will I give you an overview of what a unique visitor is, but I’ll also walk you through how to check it from your website. Let’s begin!

Who is a unique visitor to a website?

To understand what a unique visitor is, let me first define what a visitor to a website is. Visitors to a website are recorded by hosting providers based on their respective IP addresses, which are device- or network-specific. This means that if I checked on my website for the first time using my personal laptop, the web hosting records this as one visitor.

Say I needed to go to a meeting but still have some checking to do on my website. I move to my mobile phone in browsing it, which happens to also be my first time using it in checking my website. This will then be recorded as another visitor.

From henceforth, I would browse my website using my personal laptop and mobile phone when needed. Let’s say I was the only one who knew my website existed. So when I check on my website traffic at the end of the month, it will show that I had two unique visitors who incurred 50 visits each on the site. It will give a total of 100 visitors at the end of the month.

I hope that you already get the drift that a visitor may not necessarily mean it is a different individual. A visitor to a website is any person who uses or surfs its content at any given time. A new visitor, also called a unique audience or unique visitor, pertains to the first time a person accessed a website during a given reporting time using a particular device.

With that clear, you may wonder what then is the importance of knowing how many unique visitors you had in a month (or year) for your website. That I discuss next.

What Is A Unique Visitor to A Website: Importance Unlocked

There are many reasons unique visitors to a website are important. Unique visitors are indicators of a website’s attractiveness, marketing effectiveness, and website growth.

1. Website Attractiveness

Knowing the frequency or growth of unique visitors to your website is important because it reflects, first of all, its attractiveness. A website with an epic design and features would always draw in people through word-of-mouth marketing. This is why it is necessary to design your website in such a way that visitors will have a seamless or at least convenient browsing experience.

(In case you need advice on epic website designs or inspiration for it, feel free to browse the reviews I made on 16 different business niches. Surely you’ll find one suitable for your needs!)

2. Marketing Effectiveness

Another reason unique visitors are important is to know if your marketing campaigns and programs are working. That is if your advertisements are drawing in people—especially your target market—to your website so they could get to know more about your products and services.

3. Website Growth

Having unique visitors to your website is also a good indicator that your online scope or following is expanding. Getting more unique visitors from month to month means your online following is increasing. This, of course, means more business opportunities and higher sales.

Putting It In Context: What Is A Unique Visitor to A Website

Once you identify your unique visitors, there are other aspects of your website traffic that you need to understand as well. Some of these are the page views, the bounce rate, and the number of hits. These indicators will help you better understand the behavior of your visitors and what they find interesting (or not) in your content.

Your website’s page with the most views is an obvious sign of what people normally find interesting on your website. This will help you design your communication and promotion in line with that particular topic.

The bounce rate helps you see how long a visitor stayed on your website. If your bounce rate is low, say the visitors only stayed for a few seconds on a landing page (the page with the most views for example), this means they didn’t find what they exactly needed or that you need to direct them to more information on that topic. Making the necessary changes will help you with more site traffic and sales.

The number of hits on a particular page and file (image, video, document) also indicates user interest in your content by page views and actual downloads on that file. The higher the hits, the higher the user interest. This means providing more of the same content or organizing your website in a way that they are led to what they need. Of course, organizing it also in a way that will convert to sales for you.

These are basic things you need to understand and become familiar with when it comes to your website’s traffic analysis. Yet these are enough to help you get better returns on your investment: your website. Now, let me share how you can check your website’s unique visitors.

How could I see a unique visitor to a website?

Entrepreneurs and business owners in the early 2000s had to purchase a Google Analytics report before they could see the status of their website’s traffic. They also needed to acquire the services of a Marketing professional to help them understand the volume of data and numbers the Google Analytics report contained.

These days, one just needs to log on to one’s website and check on the statistics to see what one needs. The good thing is WordPress even provides its users with the basics of website traffic including views and visitors. This can be viewed by users on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly analysis.

The basic site traffic shows what particular day had the most views and visitors and which day and hour of the week had the most views. The statistics, as per WordPress, are provided by JetPack and already present unique visitors as “visitors” in its report.

Plus, the website traffic also tabulates the total comments and likes and averages it per post in a year. The number of downloads, the file most downloaded, the page most visited, and the number of shares is also presented. WordPress also shows referrers and search terms that direct people to the website and the country the visitor is from.

To get an in-depth analysis of a website’s traffic, users need to (1) upgrade to a plan or a paid subscription in WordPress and (2) install a plugin for analytics. Most of the plugins for a website’s analytics in WordPress’ paid plans are offered for free including the top tool HubSpot.

According to HubSpot, their CMS application is a powerful all-in-one tool not only for the analysis of website traffic but also for marketing and management. While MouseFlow and SimilarWeb rank second and third, respectively, as website metric tools.

It is a must to upgrade to a paid plan and install plugins for analytics if you’re serious about improving your site traffic and growing your market reach.

Okay, having said that, let me now share the steps on how you can check a website’s traffic in WordPress:

1. From the Dashboard menu, choose Statistics. This will open the Stats and Insights Page, which displays the information you need.

2. Scroll down to see the different metrics of your site in line with the behavior and activity of visitors.

3. To get more information for each metric, just expand the box by clicking the “>” at its upper right corner.

4. Scroll up to the Insights tab to see how your site’s data are interpreted by WordPress

Wrapping Up: What Is A Website Visitor to A Website

A unique visitor to a website pertains to a person who visited a website during a given reporting period using a particular device. Knowing if your website’s unique visitors are increasing every month is important to gauge if your business’ scope and reach are similarly growing. This means more potential clients and increased sales, especially when the website meets the users’ needs.

FAQs

What is a good benchmark for a website’s unique visitors?

The benchmark for unique visitors varies depending on the industry and type of website. Experts recommend monthly unique visitors of 1,000 to 10,000 for business-to-business websites. This would be even better if you reach 40,000 to 100,00 unique visitors in a month. While it is best if you achieve more than 2 million unique visitors monthly.

Do I need to reach a certain number of visitors before I can earn through my website?

As per Marketing industry practice, websites need to have a certain number of visitors to earn through online advertisements. Online advertisements are dependent on the number of a website’s page views. Advertisers normally pay $5 or less for every 1,000 page views. This is called the Cost Per Thousand (CPM) rate. Other factors that influence the value of the CPM are a website’s demographics, size, and topic or content.

If you have other questions not listed above, feel free to message me. I will be happy to assist you with your concern.