Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL ANALYTICS CONCEPTS

It is often such a baffling and confusing topic because little formal education exists for digital analytics, and people have learned their skills through hard work, determination, and real-world effort. This section is by no means an attempt to be exhaustive but will give you a simple framework with which to understand conceptually the common vocabulary of digital analytics:

• Visitor (or unique visitor). Critical and confusing, the unique visitor is among the most often cited metrics related to how many “people” visit a site. The term traffic or site traffic is often used to refer to visitors. The following table shows what you need to know.

Tool	How a Unique Visitor Is Defined	Example of Tool
Digital Analytics	A count of deduplicated cookies during the time period. In other words, if you stay at the beach house for all 30 days during an entire month. Then you are 1 “monthly unique visitor.” If the owner of the rental property was asked by his accountant, “How many people stayed at the house?” the correct answer is 1. In that same scenario, you stayed every day, correct? If the manager asks how many “people stayed at the house each day, you could say “30 daily visitors” stayed during the month—because you did stay 30 times, once per day. You were “30 daily unique visitors” but only “1 monthly unique visitor.” This scenario illustrates the potential for confusion between “monthly unique visitors” and “daily unique visitors.”	Google ...