Traffic is one of the major benchmarks of a website’s success, but there is more than one type of traffic. Website unique visitors lets you know exactly how many people visit your site without counting the number of visits.

There are many metrics website owners use to measure success from sessions to conversions, but the unique visitors is an undiluted view of the people coming to your site.

Why is this metric important? We’ll examine how you access this metric in Google Analytics and why you want to keep an eye on it. It’s easily overlooked and forgotten, but that would be a serious mistake.

Website Unique Visitors and Other Types of Traffic

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools a website owner can have. It provides mountains of data about who comes to your website and where. This vast data is also the platforms biggest problem because it can be difficult to use.

If you want to see your unique visitors, then you need to go to your analytics page and click on the acquisition menu. You then click on all traffic and source/medium.

This brings up a graph and lists all the traffic sources and medium such as Google Organic and Google PPC. There are lists of metrics that go along with that and one is unique visitors. If it isn’t part of the group, then you can choose it from a menu by clicking edit in the upper right of the page.

Why is Website Unique Visitors Important?

Google Analytics tracks many different forms of traffic from users, sessions, unique users and more. What’s the difference between these and what makes them important for your site?

A session happens when someone interacts with your website. Users are the number of people that have initiated at least one session on the site. This number tends to be smaller than sessions as one user can create multiple sessions.

A unique visitor is an individual that comes to the website regardless of the number of times they visit. A cookie tracks the users so if they return to the site it activates a session but is not counted as a user or unique visitor again.

This is important because it tracks the actual number of people coming to your site. You might have one user create 100 sessions, but that doesn’t mean your user traffic increased by 100.

The Big Picture

You can get an accurate portrayal of how many people come to your site, if they purchase something, what pages they visit and more from Google Analytics.

If you have Google Search Console or run Google Ads, then you can sync the information with Google Analytics and add that information so you can track ad performance, landing page effectiveness and keywords used to get to your site.

Metrics are the best way to get a big-picture view of your site performance over a given time period.

It’s Worth Learning Google Analytics

Along with discovering website unique visitors, there are many other metrics you can find using Google Analytics. The biggest obstacle is learning how to use it properly. It isn’t easy, but it is worth it.

If you want to learn more about the importance of metrics and effective Webdesign, explore our site.