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As our industry matures more people become involved. Unfortunately, as people enter the industry for the first time they bring some misconceptions with them. Much of the feedback I’ve received in recent months shows a growing trend of people misunderstanding unique visitor metrics.
This article seeks to address that issue.

Definition of a unique visitor
The first and most important thing to understand is that when we identify a unique visitor we do not know who that person is.
Knowing who someone is — knowing their name — is called “personally identifiable information” or PII. In other words, we have identified the person. This is not what is meant in web metrics by a “unique visitor.”

The official measure of a unique visitor is nothing more than a combination of IP address and User Agent (browser + operating system). In other words, a unique visitor is “122.223.21.09 + IE 6.01 on WinXP,” not Bob Jones at 223 Sunset Drive. In actual fact, there is no official measure for a metric which identifies Bob Jones at all. The nature of internet technology makes identification of named people on the web impossible unless a person voluntarily tells you who they are. Identification of people is so rare there is no technology to report it, and no metric to describe it.
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