Visits/Visitors/Unique Visitors

I'm a little confused...

[rintrah]

A couple of basic questions. While I understand that a unique visitor is a visitor who comes to your site more than once (tracked by IP), what is the difference between a "visit" and a "visitor".

And in terms of getting a total of visitors to one's site, is it visitors+unique visitors = total visitors or do we subtract uniques?

[ritualcoffee]

A unique visitor is just that. however, visit defers largly due to time periods.

For example a unique visitor comes to the site twice in one day - if you ran stats for a day time frame you would come out with 1 unique visitor but 2 visits.

[rintrah]

Ah, but when compiling total traffic (WebTrends), do you add uniques to visitors to get the total, or subtract?

[albert]

Neither. Total is total, uniques included. Was quite sure before you asked ...

[rintrah]

Yes but in Web Trends, I don't get a "Grand Total". I get a total for "Visits" and a Total for Unique Visitors. So if my visits total is 400, and my unique visitors total is 200, does that mean I in actuality had 200 visitors or 600?

[jatar_k]

It means you had 200 unique visitors that made a total of 400 visits to your site and they may have viewed 6000 pages and generated 14000 requests to your server.

Its apples and oranges.

[rintrah]

So I've I'm trying to a conversion rate to find out how many people have visited my site, I should ignore visits and just use uniques?

[albert]

jatar_k, I'm not so sure.

Because you've unique visitors, and you've repeatedly coming visitors (not sure if term correct in english b'cause I'm translating ..)

What I thought was:
visits = some total.
Included: unique visitors (indentified say by IP)
Repeatedly coming visitors are responsible for some other amount of visits (identified as above).

There are some visits left.

Wondering what they are ... visitors not to be indentified?

Means what?

Sorry if being a stupid question. But sometimes you (I) need a direct question to start thinking ;)

@rintrah: I guess that focusing only at uniques is too short ... what's about people coming in by changing IPs of some provider? They can't be identified as unique ...

[edit spelling/]

[jatar_k]

it definitely is always open to interpretation.

My scenario is essentially how it is supposed to work. It never works like that, there are too many other factors.

What about about proxies (aol).

It is not really an exact science. I have always found using webtrends that true uniques was somewhere between uniques and visits and depended on each specific site/server.

[rintrah]

That's my quandry as well. Going with uniques would artificially inflate my conversion rate, as there are plenty of visitors that may not be included in that total because of changing IPs etc. Adding visits and uniques together would artificially lower it.

Perhaps just forgetting uniques and using visitors?

[jatar_k]

using just visitors will probably give you the opposite scenario but may be closer to the truth.

[albert]

I use visits. And take into account repeatedly visitors.

It's a figure.

It's enough to compare say this month with previous to show what your SEO had done.

[jatar_k]

If it was for a client I would always err in their favour and leave it at that.

[albert]

jatar_k, I'm upset! ;)

And I thought our business was serious.

[jatar_k]

It is very serious but when I produce calculated results for someone who is paying me good money I feel much more ethically fulfilled if the margin of error is adjusted to favour the client, not myself.

I would rather show a little lower conversion rate than an inflated one and let sales speak for themselves. ;)

[albert]

It's the same for expected rankings clients use to ask for. Better if forecasts are not overdone.

Back on topic: Still using this webtrends thingy and don't fully understand it.

[claus]

A unique visitor is not an IP address. Here's a few threads on the subject:

(1) Differentiating human visits from robots'
[webmasterworld.com...]

(2) Sorting out AOL from the uniques
[webmasterworld.com...]

(3) Difference between a log analyzer and a stats software
[webmasterworld.com...]

(4) Identical IPs: How common is it?
[webmasterworld.com...]

(5) What to claim about your site stats?
[webmasterworld.com...]

(6) Unique visitors
[webmasterworld.com...]

(7) How to accurately determine UNIQUE visitors a week
[webmasterworld.com...]

---

Number (3) includes further links i've collected. This thread is also good, from page eight or so it gets specific.

(8) Poll: What web stats service do you use?
[webmasterworld.com...]

- page eight: [webmasterworld.com...]

On page 8, in msg. #113 i've tried to explain the metrics.

/claus