yeh, sorry I was trying to be brief. And as you know this topic generates a lot of heat.

As for seven visits being seven opportunities to sell, I sort of agree, but i would make the point it depends on what you’re selling.

If it’s a low value item then probably it is seven opportunities to sell seven different items.

If it’s a high value item, say a house, then it’s seven opportunities to build a relationship and probably only one opportunity for a sale.

And the business owner will want to know if they are dealing with one person or seven.

And as I said, no matter how you dress it up and explain it, management and business owners will take whatever number you give them as “real people” They always have.

I fully understand and accept your point about the data accuracy issue, but it’s view taken from a technical standpoint, I might even say left brain, methodical type.

The marketer and business owner wants to know the number of real people, which is more right brain, intuitive, humanistic. (Ooops, I’ve probably started a whole ‘nother debate now.)

As I keep implying we are never going to “educate them and move on” about the distinction between uniques and visits, because they are are trying to educate us about what they want, not what we can give them.

In any event, let’s not get too obsessed over conversion rate, because it is in itself a very flawed metric.

A site with a 2% conversion rate can easily be a much better performing site than one with a 20% conversion rate.

We do need to move on to a metric or set of metric that gives a more accurate picture of how a website is performing.

That is 7 opportunities to sell/build a relationship – what difference does it make if it is the same person, or seven different people? Of course there is a difference to the business. You want to know if you have a repeat, loyal customers – and your e-commerce reports will tell you this. However, form a website conversion optimisation point of view, it is not important to make that differentiation.

In an idea world, yes we would use unique visitors – but that isn’t the case, and more importantly it *never* will be. So should we stick with a flawed metric or educate users to move on? The point of this post was to add a vote (and the reasoning behind it) to the latter. That is, move away from unique visitors*.

*If you are a website that requires a log-in to access/purchase content, then it still makes sense to use unique visitors. For example, publishing or an ebay, amazon type of site.

BTW, I certainly prefer revenue related metrics as KPIs to any others. Even if not a transactional site, “value” should be caluclated where possible. A couple of relevant posts on this:

• Why web measurement is easy, yet gaining insights is hard
• Show Me the Money: How much value is your website generating?

While I understand the logic of why Visits is a more accurate measure, I disagree with favouring it over Uniques.

Visits is accurate from a technical standpoint, but as marketers and business owners we want to know how many customers (people) visited our sites and bought from us. And in that regard Visits is obviously a useless metric.

We don’t want one customer who made seven visits counted as seven people.

Uniques is closer to the mark than Visits even with all it’s flaws listed above, but at present it’s the best we’ve got.

If we were to take this argument to it’s logical conclusion then all analytics packages are useless because none of them can tell us how many real people actually came to our website.

But I digress.

The other thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter what term you tell management they will interpret it as real people numbers.

Surely most of you will remember when “hits” was used to mean real people, until most of us found out it was counting all the elements on a page etc, etc.

The point is, you’re not going to change how management hears it, no matter how detailed your explanations, because it’s not what they want to hear.

As I’ve said, they want to know real people numbers.

But fear not, there is a much more definitive metric you can use that everyone will understand, management will love and there will be no confusion about:

“Our site did $X00,000 last month.”

Now that’s a metric, and one that the bank manager will gladly accept.