Visitors

Measuring by visitors looks at unique individuals who come to your site. The easiest way to think about the difference between visitor and page view metrics is that a single visitor could view three pages — this results in 1 visitor and 3 page views. The ratio of visitors to page views indicates how many pages people look at on average.

Parse.ly distinguishes visitors between two groups: new visitors and returning visitors. These are separated by checking if a visitor has visited your site in the previous 30 days (on the same device and without clearing cookies). If they have, they qualify as “returning;” if not, they are “new.”

Use cases

• Similar to page views, total visitors still focuses on volume and reach. However, it can normalize comparing a post or section that may intentionally drive up page views — for example, comparing a slideshow post to a single-page, text-based post.
• If you are trying to reach a new audience, launching a new initiative, or trying to grow your audience, measuring by new visitors gives a good indication of success.
• If you want to build audience habits, increasing loyalty of an audience or customers, make returning visitors a key metric focus.

Pitfalls

• Most visitor data that Parse.ly collects will be for anonymous users. Parse.ly relies on first-party cookies, using the user’s browser and some estimations to provide visitor data in real time. Certain things can affect the accuracy of the visitor metric, such as: If cookies aren’t used on your site, users don’t accept cookies through their browsers, or a user visits your site on multiple devices or browsers.
• The “hotel problem” is a universal web analytics problem. Because of this, you cannot export visitor information and aggregate it outside the Parse.ly Dashboard.