“Unique” Visitors 25%-39% inflated

I’ve been working on implementations with a number of clients who have a need for visitor level tracking in Google Analytics so that they can start using GA to measure things like customer loyalty and (try to) calculate Lifetime Customer Value. I understand that there are a number of data models available to approach these sorts of questions, and that either Custom Variables or Events can be used (using either visitor level vars, or session level vars populated from server-side values).

In general, I like pushing the _utma cookie value back into Google Analytics, as it uncovers every single visit in the API. There are lots of benefits to doing this. Justin Cutroni wrote a nice post about merging GA data with a data warehouse. This is just one (powerful) thing that can be done using this method.   What interests me in this post is “how unique are ‘unique’ visitors?” We all know that a unique visitor is nothing more than the value of the _utma cookie’s unique ID. I don’t know about you, but I certainly access websites from multiple browsers from multiple computers. I don’t find it unreasonable for a “person” to indeed have 6 or 7 unique “visitor” values. Start adding in users who clear their cookies and/or Private Browsing and the meaning of “uniques” really begins to degrade.

Luckily, I have access to data where, in addition to capturing _utma values, we’re also capturing obfuscated member ID values. These values are set as a custom variable upon login. This means that a user will maintain their ID whether or not they switch browsers or clear cookies. Here are some of the numbers that I pulled.


The data set that is decently large and no data sampling has been applied to these numbers. At first glance, it appears that the number of unique logins is 61% of the number of GA’s unique visitors. Two things that stuck out at me were the number of visits in a 28 day period by some of the most active users. The top ten most active users average 11.68 visits per day. Also, line 7 had a large ratio of unique visitors to visits. Was this one user who cleared cookies often? Was this shared login information?

In order to make sure that this made sense among users who visited the site less often, I filtered by logins that had less than 3 visits per day, 2 visits per day, and visits once every 2 days. The numbers were pretty consistent for members who came 3 times a day or less, though users who visited once every 2 days or less saw a higher percentage of unique visitors to login IDs.          

Conclusion:
The unique visitor metric was never meant to describe the number of “unique visitors” to the site, where the term ‘unique visitor’ is referring to a person. While web analysts have known this for a while, I find it quite nice to be able to quantify this in number.  Indeed, from the data above, it appears that the number of unique visitors reported is somewhere between 25% – 39% greater than the number of people who visit a site.  

I recently started working on PPC and Analytics for a new launched website.  In this case, it is an Optometrist in Lincoln, NE.  I’m particularly interested in knowing if anyone has any bounce rate benchmark information for medical practice sites.  Please comment below if yes.  It seems to me that many private practices could greatly benefit from a knowledge Analytics expert.  I’ll keep everyone in the loop as to how this newly launched site is panning out.  I’ll even probably share some groovy charts.

One report that I find extremely useful in the Goals Section is the Conversion Rate Report.  In a moment, I’ll explain how a quick export of data from the Conversion Rate Report can provide valuable insight into one’s abandonment rate.  But first, a quick intro into conversion rates, abandonment rates, and conversion funnels.  In general, I assume that my readership is relatively erudite in Google Analytics.  So if this next paragraph is below your level of expertise, feel free to skip ahead.  That said, I believe it is worthwhile for all us out there who are trying to be successful on the Internet to get back to the basics and remember the fundamentals.

Fundamental #1 –>  It’s all about conversions.

Really.  It is.  Especially when it comes to e-commerce.  There are soooo many people about there who are still interested in how many people come to their site.  But if they aren’t taking the desired action(s) that you would want them to, then most likely you’re wasting time and money.

Take a step back.  Take a deep breath.  And say to yourself, “what do I want people to do when they come to my website.”  The answer(s) should be easy.  Lead generation?  (Filling out a form).  Signing up for an email list?  Online purchase?

Once you define your goal and properly configure it in the settings section, you’re ready for the next step.

But before we get there….

Fundamental #2 –>  Lowering Abandonment Rate is the best way to increase conversions.

Continue reading “Conversion Funnel Analysis – Abandonment Rate by Time of Day”