Unique Visits vs. Visits

What do visits mean? Interesting question when one starts talking about visits and their websites. Depending on what you're looking for or looking at, the numbers will either make you feel good, bad, or both.

For this one, I'm going to talk about another website, not this one, and I'm not going to identify the site. The numbers are legitimate, though, and they'll serve our purpose just fine.

Looking at one particular month, in checking the visits through the web statistics, the site had almost 18,000 visits,… unique visits. For the same time period, the site also had 491 visits,… actual visits.

This isn't a commerce site, but a business site, so both sets of numbers are pretty good. However, as you can tell, the two sets of numbers are drastically different. The first set of numbers came from the hosting company; the second set came from Google Analytics. Where they came from isn't important, though; what they are is another thing.

The first set of numbers is visits, but not necessarily people. Some of them are people, but it would take a lesson in calculus to figure it out. This site does have some products, but it's mainly a business site. What it does have is a blog, though, and that will make a big difference in numbers. The blog has a RSS link to it (RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication), which allows people with blog readers to access the feed from other areas without actually visiting the site. I have a blog reader myself that grabs feeds from dozens of blog sites that I don't actually go out and visit.

Also, when someone does a web search and your site comes up on a page someone happens to be looking at, that will also count as a visit of some sort. So, unique visits gives you some kind of indication as to just how prominent your website might be, especially if you have lots of links or offer content such as through a blog that can be accessed in many areas.

The second set of numbers is more critical, though, if you're looking to earn business or make money. These are people who actually come to your site for something specific. Maybe they read your blog and decided to come to your site to check things out. Maybe they found you on a search engine and decided to stop by. In any case, these are the people you're hoping to convert in some fashion, either to purchase something, subscribe to something, or intrigue enough to get them to contact you on the back end to possibly do business with.

If this particular site was only interested in making sales, based on its highest priced product, it has the opportunity to make almost $25,000 a month if every visitor purchased that product; in the real world, this site might have the opportunity to make around $1,000 a month or less, because it's a numbers game when it comes to sales. However, since it's a business site, it also means that it's averaging close to 20 visitors a day (numbers go down over the weekend), which also isn't bad for a business its size.

Understanding your statistics, and becoming comfortable with them, is important when you have a website. Recognize that business sites will get fewer visitors than sales sites, but both sites love visitors. Also recognize that constantly adding content, being able to get more links back to your site, and of course optimizing your site, are all integral to obtaining more visitors.

© SEO Xcellence, 2007