Unique visitors or pageviews : which is more important?

“I got 20,000 page views today” ; People often express the success of their website in this way; but the fact, why do not speak of unique visitor? You probably think that is the number of visits to highlight, or maybe there is more merit to count unique visitors. Not that easy. Why the term unique visitors is used to measure the audience of a website?

Defining an unique visitor

The number of visits and the visibility of your website in search results are visible indicators of success or failure of your SEO. This depends on your goals. What is unique visitor? And how is it measured?

Definition of unique visitor

In website audience measurement, an unique visitor refers to a user who visits a website, only once, during a given period. This is identified by an unique IP address or a cookie (a small text file size stored in the computer and in which a Web Browser stores information). The number of unique visitors will be an estimate, since the identification of users can cause accuracy problems. For example, a computer can be used by multiple users, but the Web server will count only one visit.

Do you measure the multiple site visits?

How  Web Agencies / SEO measure the audience of your website? They rely on visitors or unique visitors multiple? For all sites of an agency it is very difficult to achieve a traffic of 300 visitors per week (SEO). This is understandable, the reasons are many: little or no content, site too young and therefore few important natural backlinks (not purchased from bad neighborhood) etc. When the agency has over 1,000 sites to be treated is a problem.

Inadequate traffic in websites is one of the reasons that lead to interpret the SEO data of your site as page views (that is multiple visits by a single visitor). As the number of visitors is higher than unique visitors, the choice is quickly made. Now a multiple number of visitors is still insufficient enough, would you be fooled? In this situation, we advise you too look closer to your statistics and do not underestimate your visitors.

Measuring the unique visitors of a site would be a bad choice too

Many SEO forum discussion run on how to measure the target audience of a website. A forum member in one forum wondered if it was not advisable to count pageviews. For example, imagine that your website is the equivalent of a paper magazine. Would you prefer a unique visitor, that is to say a person who would take your magazine once and no longer looked after laminating a few pages? Or would you prefer a multiple visitors, that is to say a person who would take your magazine every day and look upon its pages repeatedly?

However, if we measure human hearing compared to that populated the Web of IP addresses and cookies, there is a glaring gap problem. Indeed among the hits unique visitors generated by the spiders, those generated by the webmaster, utilities tools, email extractors and other pseudo visitors would also be counted as persons. Be careful, beware of scams!

Unique visitors, the controversy

Despite technological advances, there are quite a delay on the side of audience measurement. The tracking methods and interpretations of unique visitors are diverse. Every web agency, every webmaster uses a different measurement tool.  There are many different statistical tools too. An example, along with Google Analytics, the tool TraceMyIP was used to measure the visitors of this website. The point is that  TraceMyIP is always more generous in number of unique visitors as Google Analytics ( the case is real ). To remain optimistic, Google Analytics can help you improve your statistics by setting the bar higher. But do not be too fixed on the quantitative, give more attention to quality of the traffic.