Friday, October 21, 2016

Unique Visitors


With Today’s technology it is easy for a company to count how many times their site is visited. What a company really needs is the metric that helps them identify how many different people visited the site versus that one person who visits the site thirty times deciding if they want the sale item. This metric is commonly known as unique visitors. “Unique visitor is a term used in Web analytics to refer to a person who visits a site at least once within the reporting period” (Techopedia, 2016). 
           
Unique visitors can provide crucial data for companies that allow them to identify the success of their marketing campaigns and their ability to drive traffic to the site. Successfully driving traffic from marketing campaigns is imperative in today’s technology, digital media world (Brehme, 2014).
           
A great example of a company that actively tracks their unique visitors is Indeed. Indeed is a job posting site where companies post available job positions and potential employees can apply to these openings. Indeed actively promotes the over 140 million unique visitors it has every month (Indeed, 2014). This is a marketing tool that tells companies how many people they are reaching by posting on their site, and lets employees know that this is the place to go to find the best job postings. Keeping track of the unique users helps drive more users and traffic to the site.
           
Unique Visitors is also great for businesses that experience seasonal changes. Companies are able to keep track of traffic changes during certain seasons, which can lead to great marketing advice. The ability to identify peak seasons and times allows marketing departments to determine when seasonal campaigns should begin and when they should start to whine down. Identifying this timing is just as important as creating a great campaign. Malcolm Gladwell most famously discussed the importance of timing with his example using Bill Gates:

            “Why is Bill Gates a billionaire? He's smart, of course, and he has tremendous ambition. But he probably wouldn't have started Microsoft (MSFT) if he hadn't been born in 1955. That made Gates old enough to take advantage of the opportunities that opened up with the introduction, in 1975, of the Altair 8800, the first do-it-yourself computer kit. But he wasn't so old as to be too settled in his life to take a leap of faith” (Bloomberg, 2008).


This excerpt from Gladwell perfectly explains that timing can create a crucial advantage in a person’s life and this can be carried over to marketing campaigns as well. If a marketing campaign is released a day or two after or even before a major event, can be the difference between a effective campaign and a complete flop.
           
            Using unique visitors as a web analytic on a company’s website can provide invaluable information for management in their decision making process. Unique visitors, in my opinion, are a metric that all companies should use. This statistic may seem unimportant or unimpressive but a random spike or decline during any period can be a clue into the thought process of a target market. 

References


Brehme, A. (2014, June 17). How Unique Visitors – and Mobile Users – Tie to Your
Bottom Line. Retrieved October 17, 2016, from https://www.hostway.com/blog/how-unique-visitors-and-mobile-users-tie-to-your-bottom-line/ 


Gladwell's Outliers: Timing is Almost Everything. (2008, November 20). Retrieved


How 140 Million Unique Visitors Use Indeed to Find Jobs - Indeed Blog. (2014,
March 27). Retrieved October 17, 2016, from http://blog.indeed.com/2014/03/27/how-140-million-unique-visitors-use-indeed-to-find-jobs/
 


What is a Unique Visitor? - Definition from Techopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved October 17,
2016, from https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1611/unique-visitor

 

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