Unique Visitors and Cookies

Unique Visitors and Cookies

            People new to web analytics hear the terms Visitors, Time on Page and Time on Site, Bounce Rates, Exit Rates, Conversion Rates, and Engagement.  These are all important metrics in evaluating the actions of visitors to a web site.  To start and as a novice to web metrics, this post will explore one metric, Unique Visitors.  This is complicated and tough subject to explore for several reasons described below.  “Traffic, as represented by unique visitors, will always be estimated under the current technological regime” (Dean, 2015).  Despite this, marketers count on the number unique visitors to give them an idea of the ‘who’ that is visiting the website.  Unique visitors count is one of the four foundational web metrics.  The other three include Visit/Sessions, Page Views and Events.   Unique visitors count is defined as the amount of individual people during a time period that visit a site.  Each individual is counted only once for that particular time.  More specifically, marketers when using this as a metric need to remember that “it is likely, but not always true, that each unique visitor is a unique person; and, 2) The unique visitors metric can be influenced by browsers that don’t accept cookies” (Kaushik, 2010).  Unique visitor count cannot be done without the use of Cookies.  Cookies are sometimes considered the topic of “fear, uncertainty and doubt” (Kaushik, 2010).    Despite these stipulations, “Unique visitors metric continues to be a superior approximation of the number of people visiting a website” (Kaushik, 2010).  

How are Unique Visitors tracked?

            Important to tracking unique visitors is the use of cookies. As mentioned earlier, cookies are a topic of “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” among users but without them some measures of web analytics would not be the same.  What are cookies?  Simply put “Web cookies give the Web a memory” (Dean, 2015).  The illustration from hongkiat.com.  To further explain, cookies “are small test files containing an anonymous unique identifier that stitches together visits to the website by the same the person” (Kaushik, 2010).  Lou Montulli, inventor of cookies, described cookies as “online loyalty cares, stamped by a website every time you stopped by” (Dean, 2015).  

            Cookies can be transient or persistent. Transient cookies are used just during the time a user visits a site.  The persistent cookie is established when a user first visits a site.  These cookies stay for a period of time and “are the closest thing to tracking a person or unique visitor” (Kaushik, 2010).  Persistent cookies stay on a user’s browser until deleted. 

            Other parameters of cookies are types.  Cookie types are either first party or third party.  First party cookies are used by the web site itself as opposed to third party cookies.  When a visitor comes to the web site, the identifier is attached.  “Email providers such as hotmail.com or gmail.com, ecommerce websites such as amazon.com, banks, or even blogging platforms require you to accept first-party cookies” (Kaushik, 2010).  Third party cookies seem to be declining in use.  

Successful Unique Visitors Counts

            ComScore measures unique visitors similar to Nielsen ratings for TV.  Websites hire comScore or other measurement companies that “embed little one-pixel ‘beacons’ in each of their pages that report back to these measurement companies each time a page is loaded” (Dean, 2015).   This is where internal measurement and unique visitors measurement is complicated.  One web security firm found that ‘bots’ make up some of the unique traffic on website and may be counted in unique visitors counts. 

            One company that seems to be successful at counting is BuzzFeed.  According measurement firm, comScore, BuzzFeed had 74.6 million unique visitors in the month of August, 2015.  The author could not confirm that this is a marketing goal for each.  However, the numbers prove in general terms,  Buzzfeed had set a goal to gain unique visitors and are successful at doing so.  In 2013 BuzzFeed received a huge amount of unique visitors as a result of Facebook pushing users to “quality news” sites such as BuzzFeed (Dean, 2015).   But this may change with because Facebook is now hosting articles on its own serves to keep visitors on its own site.   Why? To change the cookie regime, Facebook knows it users and can use these exact numbers to market advertising opportunities.  Facebook intends to host articles on its servers that will make more people read the articles without leaving.  But what does this mean for BuzzFeed unique visitor count?  Time will tell.

References:

Alpert, B. (2014).  Buzzfeed Crosses $100 Million in Revenue, Staff Memo Says. Retrieved October 31, 2015 from: http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-reaches-more-than-130-million-unique-visitors-in-no#.inDR9wR39 

BuzzFeed Press. (2013).  BuzzFeed Reacher More than 130 Million Unique Visitors in November.  Retrieved October 31, 2015 from: http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-reaches-more-than-130-million-unique-visitors-in-no#.inDR9wR39

Dean, S. (2015).  It’s 2015 – You’d think we’d have figured out how to measure Web traffic by by now. Retrieved October 31, 2015 from: http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-reaches-more-than-130-million-unique-visitors-in-no#.inDR9wR39

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing. ISBN# 978-0470529393