Meaning & use
unique visitor
Last updated
Meaning
nouncountabletechnical
A single person or device counted once, however many times it opens a website during a set period of time.
Grammar: Usually plural in reports: the site had 40,000 unique visitors, not 40,000 visits.
Patterns
- unique visitors to something
- unique visitors per month
The blog attracted about 12,000 unique visitors in its first month online.
Our advertisers care more about unique visitors than about total page views.
She was pleased that the number of unique visitors doubled after the redesign.
Word forms
| plural | unique visitors |
|---|
Common combinations
- monthly unique visitors
- The news site reports two million monthly unique visitors.
- count unique visitors
- The software counts unique visitors by browser cookie.
- attract unique visitors
- A weekly video series helped the shop attract unique visitors.
- number of unique visitors
- The number of unique visitors dipped during the summer.
- unique visitors and page views
- The report compares unique visitors and page views side by side.
Synonyms and how they differ
- individual user
- Individual user is a looser phrase that can describe any person using a product, while unique visitor is a measurement term tied to a counting period.
- visitor
- Visitor on its own may include repeat visits by the same person, whereas unique visitor deliberately removes the repeats.
- unique user
- Unique user is nearly interchangeable but is more common for apps and logged-in services than for open websites.
Opposites
Word family
- unique adjective
- being the only one of its kind
- uniquely adverb
- in a way that belongs to only one thing
- uniqueness noun
- the quality of being one of a kind
- visit verb
- to go to a place or page
Commonly confused: unique visitor or page view? unique visitor or session?
unique visitor vs page view
A page view counts every time a page loads, even for the same person. A unique visitor counts the person only once.
unique visitor vs session
A session is one continuous stretch of activity. One unique visitor can start many sessions.
Practice
A website had 50,000 page views last week, but one reader refreshed the page hundreds of times. Which figure removes that effect?
Choose one answer.
Unique visitors counts each person once no matter how often they load pages. Total page views would still include every refresh, so it does not remove the effect.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “unique visitor”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.