“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.

Number of Unique Members is 61% of "Unique Visitors"

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.

The Bottom Line:

The “unique visitor” metric was never meant to describe the number of “unique people” that visited a site. Admittedly, this terminology can be confusing for the average person. While web analysts have known that ‘unique visitors’ refers to a count of unique cookie values in the browser, I find it quite nice to be able to quantify this in numbers.  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. If you have any additional data, please feel free to share below.