Is There a Standard for Tracking Website Visits?

At work I’ve been asked numerous times “How man unique visits do we get?”. To which I reply, “It depends who you talk to.”

We run a handful of traffic software packages to help get a handle on all the different statistics incorporated with running a successful website. Google Analytics, Mint and a very simple page view counter I developed in house. Each package takes a different approach to computing unique visits:

Google Analytics declares a visit as:

Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

“30 minutes of inactivity” seems to be the norm among a few other statistical packages I’ve used in the past.

Mint takes a different approach:

The timeframes represented in the Visits pane are independent of each other meaning that the sum of total and unique visits of the hours in a day will not necessarily equal the total and unique visits in that same day.

Confused? Me too. From what I gather, the visit is based on which ever time frame you want. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. And technically it isn’t a visit at all, but more a visitor per (insert time frame here). Either way, the numbers look dreadfully small and that’s never fun.

I can’t help but feel like both packages leave something to be desired. Who’s to say that if I visit the same website multiple times in less than 30 minutes or an hour, that shouldn’t be counted as a separate visit?

I always think of ebay when looking at visits. I use ebay many times throughout any given work day to get a ballpark figure on the cost of random items and the occasional dream truck. Great way to avoid GTD. My searches on ebay may be random, but I guarantee that once I leave, my interested has dwindled and ultimately my “visit” has been completed. I may return in a few minutes interested in a different product, at which point a new “visit” has begun.

So I guess what I’m getting at is that the idea of visits needs to be looked at in comparison with the information being accessed during that visit. In my opinion, a news website should probably adopt the Google approach and base their visits on a 30 minute basis. Shopping and product based websites should count a visit as the user visiting, leaving, and then returning and searching for something different.

Either way, there needs to be a standard. Hmm, that’s what this post started out to be about. I think I got a little off track. Oh Well. Later days.

stats, analytics, mint, google, ebay, standards

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