A common problem in today’s ever changing media landscape is how you interpret figures and statistics in regards to site website traffic.

No doubt you will have heard phrases such as ‘hits’, ‘page impressions’, ‘click throughs’, ‘views’ and even ‘visitors’.

As the world wide web has expanded over the years it has undergone huge technological leaps, meaning today’s virtual landscape is unrecognisable from its birth. Consequently the terminology used to describe website traffic has changed, with all of these phrases coming to the fore and then becoming outdated.

In today’s world wide web there is only one phrase that really counts, and ultimately one way to measure it without any bias, tweaking, fudging or manipulation. This holy grail is ‘unique users’ and the best way to measure it is ‘Google Analytics’ figures. While there are other measuring sticks, Google now accounts for more than 90 percent of global website searches and is widely recognised as having the only truly trustworthy algorithms to monitor it.

Ultimately a unique user represents a single computer or IP address, with a person in front of it. It also does not replicate itself, so no matter how many times a unique user comes back to a website in a given period, they are only registered as a single ‘reader’ or ‘viewer’ of the website. This means if ten people visit the SignLink website in a single month, even they come back ten times a day, every day, our unique users for that month is still ten. This piece of information is of most value to advertisers as it can be cleanly and clearly compared via Google Analytics figures with other websites. And it tells you how many individual consumers are actually looking at a website and ultimately your products.

If you would like to start the ball rolling by seeing our Google Analytics figures then please call our administration department on 0117 960 3255 or email richard@linkpublishing.co.uk.