Tag: visitor

Measuring Visitor Attention

Last month, comScore changed from measuring page views to their new “visits” metric, designed to better measure visitor engagement. Or, as they put it, “visits” measures “the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content, thereby illustrating a key component of user engagement.”
Nielsen//NetRatings is not one to be left behind. The The Wall Street Journal (sub req) reports on NTRT’s new metric: “Nielsen/NetRatings, in June will release what it calls ‘time-spent’ data and stop issuing its rankings by page views.”

What Exactly is a Unique Visitor?

What’s the difference between a unique visitor and a user? This post will outline the basics. Many people make the mistake of equating the two, and there are some substantial differences.

First let’s look at how a web analytics package measures a visitor. The first step is to cookie the machine when a user visits it. Once the cookie is set, that machine is considered a unique visitor.

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