Web Site Measurement Hacks

Get to Know Your Visitors

Knowing that you have three totally different kinds of unique visitors coming to your web site can save you time, money, and headaches.

Visitors are the fundamental currency in web measurement—the top of the pyramid, as shown in Figure 1-5. The idea of the “known visitor” is important to web measurement because, given the right message, any good salesperson can sell; the sales process breaks down when forced to sell to anonymous groups. Think about the difference between a really good car salesperson and a car commercial on TV—the commercial may sway you one way or the other, but it’s the salesperson speaking to you directly who will seal the deal. Because of the universal desire to “know” the visitor, it’s important to understand the three major visitor categories: totally anonymous, mostly anonymous, and known (Figure 1-5).

Figure 1-5. The three types of unique visitors

Totally Anonymous Visitors

Some of the visitors who come to your web site will be truly and potentially forever anonymous; there’s very little you can truly know about them except where they came from (their referring URLs) and which pages they view during their visits. This small but persistent group may be as many as 15% of Internet users who disable all cookies, surf through proxies that hide their IP addresses, or otherwise work to obfuscate their identities. While there are alternatives to using cookies [Hack #17] to determine the relative uniqueness of a visitor, anyone with motivation, desire, and a basic understanding of how Internet browsers work can prevent you from knowing much about him at all. The fact that this group exists is reason enough to exclusively use first party cookies in your analysis [Hack #16] .

Mostly Anonymous Visitors

The bulk of people who visit your site are mostly anonymous: people who don’t go out of their way to hide from you but also don’t offer up any truly useful personal information. Most of your Internet audience will accept cookies [Hack #15] , allowing you to determine whether they have been to your site previously, how they originally found you, whether they are customers or not, and how you can segment them into meaningful categories [Hack #48] .

Still, unless you provide a reasonable trade for their personal information (or require it, as is becoming increasingly popular), visitors are unlikely to divulge enough to allow you to feel like you truly “know” them.

Known Visitors

Known visitors are those folks who, for whatever reason, have provided you personally identifiable information (PII) [Hack #26] and allowed you to set some kind of unique user identifier (UUID) in their browsers. Typically the smallest of the three groups, known visitors are tremendously valuable to site operators and Internet marketers because, by virtue of allowing their identification to be known, their online activities can be tied to offline information, including demographic profiles and purchase or support histories.

One way to think about the differences between the three types of visitors is this: truly anonymous visitors force you to say that “some people visited my web site.” Mostly anonymous visitors allow you to say that “some people visited my web site, and 30 percent of them had been to the site within the previous week.” Known visitors allow you to say that “Bob, Ted, Alice, and Mary visited my web site; Alice looked at a product that she ultimately purchased in my store; and Mary later called to complain about a problem, which was handled by our support group.”