At Last, Vindication on Visits Vs. Unique Visitors!

It is rare in this world that we get to expe­ri­ence pub­lic vin­di­ca­tion of our ideas. So it was with excite­ment that I read on the SeekingAl­pha blog about Yahoo pres­i­dent Susan Decker’s com­ments dur­ing the company’s fourth quar­ter earn­ings call. I must have missed this when it first came out with all the post-Christmas excite­ment, but I revis­ited the earn­ings release just this past week in light of all the Microsoft/Yahoo chat­ter and what a gem I found!

Decker said that, mov­ing for­ward, Yahoo would use vis­its rather than unique vis­i­tors as the most rel­e­vant met­ric for track­ing the rel­a­tive suc­cess of Yahoo sites.

She said:

“With con­sumers access­ing the web in so many ways, we’ve looked for a more uni­fy­ing global met­ric that’s more flex­i­ble across Yahoo’s and our part­ners’ prop­er­ties and use­ful across mul­ti­ple devices and geo­gra­phies. We expect to use vis­its to Yahoo’s global start­ing points and anchor sites to be the most rel­e­vant met­ric going forward.”

She points out that the met­rics that have been dis­cussed in the past, such as uniques and page views, “may not tell the story of what’s hap­pen­ing and the key, value-creating start­ing points for con­sumers and advertisers.”

Ha! Let me bask in the light of a swift moment of “I told you so.”

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a blog post in which I said that, as a met­ric, vis­its were far more use­ful than unique vis­i­tors when track­ing web per­for­mance. And, though I received plenty of kudos from oth­ers within the indus­try, it must be said that I got my share of “what could this wacky guy be think­ing?” type of responses. The guys at Future Now, for exam­ple, were par­tic­u­larly scathing in their grokdot­com blog.

My the­ory was based on a few sim­ple (or, as grokdot­com called them, “sim­plis­tic”) reasons:

1. Vis­its are more accu­rate than unique visitors.

2. Every visit rep­re­sents an oppor­tu­nity to per­suade or con­vert a vis­i­tor to a customer.

3. Mea­sur­ing vis­its is based on fairly estab­lished indus­try standards.

I explained each of those rea­sons in detail. I also con­tin­ued to explore the rea­son­ing behind my the­ory in other posts, includ­ing one where I laid out 15 rea­sons why all unique vis­i­tors are not cre­ated equal.

As I pointed out then, users access the Inter­net via a vari­ety of browsers and a vari­ety of com­put­ers.  Also, mul­ti­ple users can access the inter­net via a vari­ety of browsers on a sin­gle com­puter.  Users delete or accept cook­ies on var­i­ous browsers and var­i­ous com­put­ers. At any given point in time, then, these sce­nar­ios are being played out by your vis­i­tors to your web­site.  They are inher­ent in unique vis­i­tor counts and, by their very def­i­n­i­tion, make unique vis­i­tor counts com­pletely unreliable.

Today, the issue gets even more com­pli­cated.  Users access the Inter­net not only by a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent com­put­ers (their home com­puter, their com­puter at work, their husband’s or wife’s com­puter) but by a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent devices includ­ing Black­ber­ries and iPhones.

Times are chang­ing, and the world of web ana­lyt­ics must change, too.  If you didn’t take my word for it, back in 2006, that vis­its was a more accu­rate mea­sure than unique vis­i­tors, think about what Susan Decker of Yahoo said.  And Susan wasn’t alone either – sev­eral other large media con­cerns have explic­itly or implic­itly gone this same direc­tion.  Then, go back and read or re-read my 15 rea­sons unique vis­i­tors are not cre­ated equal.

Con­sider that this might be just the first indi­ca­tion of a sea-change that is tak­ing place in the world of web ana­lyt­ics. New devices, new tech­nolo­gies and new ways of using the web con­tinue to cre­ate the need for con­stant vig­i­lance on the part of web ana­lyt­ics com­pa­nies.  We can’t afford to sit back and rely on what has worked in the past.

That’s part of the rea­son I was so pumped when I read about Yahoo’s shift.  It means we at Omni­ture are mov­ing in the right direc­tion.  We’re suc­cess­fully stay­ing on top of the changes the web world is encountering.

I’ll con­tinue to explore these changes, and to share my thoughts with you.  Hope­fully, they’ll help you to more eas­ily nav­i­gate the choppy but excit­ing waters of a Web 2.0 world.  In the mean­time, let me know your thoughts, even if you dis­agree.  As always, I look for­ward to read­ing your comments.