The Methods of Tracking Unique Visitors to Your Website By Daniel D Dwase

Calculating the number of visitors to your website or tracking the traffic of your website within a specific time frame refers to the number of visits that your website gets during that time.

On the other hand, the statistics that describe the unit of traffic to your website within a specific period of time, counting each visitor only once, refers to unique visitors to your site.

The statistics reveal the true audience size of your site and it's important for you to know as well as advertisers who wish to advertise on your website.

How to Calculate Unique Visitors

Many online marketers don't give priority to track visitors unique to their site because most of the time the results are not accurate.

However, tracking visitors who are unique to your website gives you an idea of the amount of traffic you are receiving to your website.

Tracking also provides a data on the performance of your website across the web and its ability to attract new visitors to it.

Here are different methods of tracking visitors...

IP Address Tracking

Earlier, companies were using the method of IP address tracking as web analytics. Although the method can't provide accurate result, some companies still use this method for tracking visitors.

There are two basic reasons why the result is not satisfactory with this method. Firstly, it is possible that more than one user will use the same IP address when they are working on different computers through networking.

In such cases, it is difficult to know if multiple users, sharing the same IP address, visit your website and it will be counted as single visitor.

On the other hand, Internet Service Providers (ISP) are able to provide multiple IP addresses to their customers for the requests the visitors make for the site.

In such cases, a single visitor can look like many by using proxy addresses and it may be difficult to track the number of visitors unique to your website.

Secondly, you can place the cookie on the computers of your visitors and monitor the cookies.

Registration Tracking

Requiring each visitor to register with your website helps you get the identity of each visitor. This type of visitor tracking is calculated with actual site login of visitors.

It helps you monitor each movement of visitors through your site and the visit session based on the login.

Once logged in, visitors can see their personal info as well. It is a great way to track visitors if, and only if, they login.

But, what about visitors who leave your site without registration? Sometimes, visitors go through the information available without logging into the site. In such situations, it becomes important to track the pre-registration behavior of visitors on your site.

Hence, the other way of tracking visitors unique to your site, apart from login tracking, is cookie tracking.

Cookie Tracking

Cookie tracking works with a cookie placed on the computer of each visitor when they access your website.

The movements of visitors through your site are tracked with the help of the cookie. Cookies are assigned per machine and the single and multiple session of login are tracked by the web analytic tools based on the cookie.

However, if the same visitor accesses your site on a different computer and different IP addresses, the tracking tool is not able to find it out.

Basically, potential advertisers of your website study the data available from the tracking of unique visitors to find out popular sites among particular demographic group.

What has helped me track visitors to one of my websites is using Google Analytics.

Using Google Analytics I can see the amount of visitors to the site each month. It also gives me an overview of where my visitors are coming from, how long they spend on my site and what keywords they are using to find my site etc.

How to Increase Unique Visitors to Your Website?

Advertising your website across the web is effective way of increasing unique visitors to your website.

Banner advertisement, pay per click, newsletters, paid blog reviews are the form of advertisement that can bring more number of visitors to your website. (See "Proven Web Site Advertising Techniques for Your Online Business")

However, getting higher rankings in search engines is another way of making your website popular across the web and getting more unique visitors as well as returning visitors to your website. (See "Effective Website Optimization Techniques to Increase Search Engine Rankings")

Tracking visitors to your website is imperative for it can help you develop new techniques of generating visitors to your website.

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