What is a Unique Visitor?

When a friend P asked me what how many unique visitors I had, I was embarrassed that I had absolutely no idea.  And silly me was too embarrassed to just ask (P if you’re reading this it’s ok if you laugh).  I didn’t want him to think I was stupid or something.  If you know me, I don’t come across as very intelligent – quite ditzy in fact. In Singapore they would cruelly say blurr sotong (singlish). I prefer ditzy.

His question did lead me to tracking my unique visits  in February.  Somehow I am not that interested in the technical stuff, so even at that point I didn’t make an effort to find out more about what all the stats meant. I always thought that like the name suggested, unique visitors were brand new visitors and only counted once a day.  I was not quite right.

If we get down to specifics, unique visitors are only counted once.  So people who  visit my blog more than once during a specific time period (say 30 minutes) are only counted as 1 unique visitor.  My mum may visit my blog 3 times in 30 minutes, but her visit is now counted as only 1 unique visit, although she does generate loads of hits for me.
I guess, unique visitors would be something that advertisers or marketers look at to determine whether a site has enough of the real traffic that they want.

These are my stats (the numbers in the pink stars on my blog) as of 12th April 2011. Maybe it’ll be useful if you want to track your unique visitors too.

Total counter state:

Hits:         65835
Hosts:        21704
Sessions:     45543 (unique visitors since 19 February 2011)

Last week:

Hits:         9380 (the more graphics you have the more hits are registered – I didn’t know this till today)
Hosts:        4784 (computer through which the blog is viewed – could be 10 people in one company and that’s counted as 1 host)
Sessions:     6429 (unique visitors within a time frame – probably within half an hour I guess)

So from last week’s stats only 69% of my hits are actual unique visits. Glad I am more aware of this now, because this year I aim to learn more about social media and everything else under the sun.  Please feel free to correct me in the comments if I got any of the technical stuff wrong.  Through my tech experiences, I realized that trial and error is always the best way for me to learn.

Some unique visitors I can already think of are all the lovely visitors who comment on this blog.  You have to check them out.  They have awesome blogs which makes me even more flattered that they take time to visit mine.

About bookjunkie

Blogging about life in Singapore & recently cancer too.
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10 Responses to What is a Unique Visitor?

  1. This is very helpful as I’ve been meaning to look this info up, but it wasn’t priority for me. (Being a visual person, I just like to look at “how high my bars are”). Thanks!

  2. Maria says:

    Are those stats for Tiny Island or for Singapore Actually? I’m wondering whether that’s information you can get from a wordpress.com blog or if it’s only available with a self-hosted one.

    • bookjunkie says:

      I had to add the stat counter from Go Stats. I recall signing up for an account and then pasting in the html code as one of the widgets. Hope you try it too. WordPress doesn’t count unique visitors so I signed up for that just for fun when I realized I didn’t have a count of that and now I find it quite useful. I added it for Singapore Actually first and then realized I could add another one for this blog as well.

      Here’s the link http://gostats.com/

  3. Maria says:

    Thanks! I’ve bookmarked the site for later — I’d love to have the information, but I’m not quite ready to go public with my stats. (Number very tiny lah!)

  4. Ishar says:

    You can get more details about your visitors/blog traffic by using “Google Analytics” (http://www.google.com/analytics/) Yep, It’s free service by Google. At the first glance you will feel bit complicated, but it’s much fun after few days. It gives very important stats such as how many visitors from specific country/city, daily/monthly/weekly traffic, time spending on ur blog, which browser had used to view ur site, how many mac users/windows users/linux users viewing ur site, or even what type of net connections they’re using ect.

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