Monthly Unique Visitor

Who is a Monthly Unique Visitor?

A monthly unique visitor refers to an individual who visits a website at least once within a given month. The software that tracks and counts website traffic can distinguish between a visitor who visits the site once and a unique visitor who returns to the site often. Multiple visits in a month account for one monthly unique visitor. They are counted only once per visitor for a single month.

A unique visitor is determined by cookies, and they are calculated on the basis of a selected reporting period. An individual visitor during that reporting period is counted only once. There are several categories of unique visitors, namely, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly unique visitors.

Understanding Unique Visits/Visitors

Visits refer to the number of times the site is visited, and it does not matter how many visitors make up those visits. It is recorded as two visits from one visitor when he/she goes to a website twice a week and so on. The number of unique visitors is important; website owners track the figure to help marketers understand customer behavior because a user can make multiple visits.

The specified number of visits may be greater than the number of visitors. Unique user assessment is a common way of measuring the popularity of a website and is often used to determine the potential advertisers or investors. Unique visits are usually measured over a standard period of time, for example, a week, a month, etc.

Calculating Unique Visitors

A visitor is often referred to as a unique user or unique visitor to show that each user of visitor is only counted once. It can be hindered by automatic activity such as bots that classify web content. While estimating the data, it is filtered to remove any suspicious activity that may be handled by bots. It is done by eliminating known IP addresses for bots by asking for registration or cookies permission.
Comparing the unique visitor metric to the total visits figure helps understand repeats vs. new visitors.

Uses of Unique Visitor Metric

The unique visitor figure can be used by:

• Strategy and investment teams to measure a brand’s reach
• Publishers to assess the exposure for a competitor’s piece of content
• Advertisers to quantify the impact of another company’s campaign

Illustrative Example

Consider an online shopping website as an example. The website lists 1,000 unique users on each day of the month. With only this data, the number of monthly unique users cannot be inferred. The website can track unique user traffic over a longer period, and they build up a reliable view on their performance against competitors within the sector.

Online businesses keep track of unique users and new business clients by maintaining static conversation ratios. One of the limitations of the system is that unique user data for websites is usually counted by using cookies. When an individual visits a website, the site checks whether a particular cookie is present or not. If the website detects the presence of a cookie, the cookie value is captured, and if the cookie is not present, the website creates a new cookie.

Related Readings

CFI offers the Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA)™ certification program for those looking to take their careers to the next level. To keep learning and advancing your career, the following resources will be helpful:

• Customer Renewal Rate
• Engagement Rate
• Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• See all valuation resources