Unique Users

Unique Users are basically the users that visit your eCommerce website at least once in a fixed duration of time, which is generally 30 days. In simpler terms, it is a metric that keeps a record of the number of unique individual users that visit a page or multiple pages on your website in a given time interval. However, if a user requests the pages on your website, he is not counted as a unique user meaning if a user visits a page on your website and then clicks on a hyperlink on that page and browses to other pages on your website and then returns to the page he started from to browse some different pages on your website, then the user is counted as a single unique user i.e the metric is not page-oriented, it is user-oriented. 

A unique user isn’t the metric that counts the number of visits on the pages of your website, it is different. You can use Google Analytics to find out the number of unique users on your website. Unique users are also called “users” and it is an important tool to measure, track and understand your website’s audience. Google Analytics defines unique users as the number of unduplicated visitors ( i.e. the unique user is counted only once )to your website over a specific period of time. 

However, a user that has had at least one session within a given time period on your website is called a new user. A new user can be your first-time customer as well as a customer that has returned to your website after a long time. In order to understand the figures of your site audience, it is necessary that you track the unique users on your website at least once a month because it helps you find out whether your customer engagement is increasing or decreasing or in another scenario has been constant over a period of time. 

Imagine your website has 10,000 visitors and 20,000 sessions, then this means on average a user visits your website two times over a span of 30 days. The unique user metric is compared over consecutive months by maximum business owners to understand whether the number is increasing or decreasing as compared to the previous month. But these monthly comparisons are often misleading because when two months are compared they are different in many ways i.e for example, the number of holidays in two months is generally not the same. That is why, while comparing unique users over a period of time, one should make yearly comparisons because they give better insights into the changes in the metric. 

If the number of unique users increases over a year then we obtain a trend line that shows whether a business is succeeding or failing in growing its audience.