Quick one - Visits vs. Visitors is a great piece on why the first matters more than you might think and why the second is less accurate than you might presume. Good read:
Here are my top reasons for using visits:
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
Guess I'm on an analytics binge today.
Just finished looking at an Omniture presentation that talks about what kind of Key Performance Indicators you want to measure depending on what kind of site you are. For example, if you are a Media site, Uniques can be one of the important measures. If you are a Finance site, something like Transactions would be more important.
Agreed - visits are more accurate & def. better for rolling up with detailed SEO analysis.
To me - I like to have all data so I can dig upside-down, backwards, and sideways, depending on who wants to know what. Data rules.
Execs of media companies will want to know Uniques, even if there is a degree of variance.
I use "unique visits" when trying to acquire advertisers because they're always trying to reach out to a wider audience.
However, we always use "visits" when tracking our conversion rate.
Rand, Matt Belkin's comparison is a strange one. Visitors and visits are two very different things and you would use each of them in different ways. with visitor metrics you get information related to the sales cycle as well as lifetime value. With visits metrics you get some of these other metrics that Matt has written about. Deemphasizing visitors is not the answer, understanding it and using it appropriately is.
I've agreed with this for a long time. I can track uniques through the last 2 years. Big difference between uniques from 2 years back and uniques from 2 days ago. Who knows when they buy and buy more than once. Many of my potential customers visit myriads of times before they convert into contacts. While the average # of visits ranges between 2-3 some visit over 20 times before they convert.
And if the same IP buys more than once. That is a wierd non-relevant conversion statistic.
Visits is a better metric.
good initial post and good reference, Rand