I don’t think it’s enlightening anyone to allow the vendors to label data as “Unique Visitors” when it is not in fact “Unique Visitors”. If someone else comes in and looks at an analysts numbers and sees differences between the vendors “Unique Visitors” and the numbers the analyst is reporting, that’s extremely confusing, and fairly suspect too. Whereas, if they saw, “First Party Cookies”, “Unique User ID’s”, and internal database reports put together to create a “Unique Visitor” metric, that would actually make some sense. Not to mention added value for the analyst! Look at what your analyst does for the company! He or she isn’t just copy/pasting!

That’s part of why so many organizations are taking such a long time to put on dedicated web analysts. We allow vendors to water down metrics so that they don’t think they need a web analyst. They can just set up a dashboard in Omniture, schedule it to email out every week and that’s good enough.

“And it is really up to the analyst to ensure that s/he understands what is being measured, and what is the best way to convey that to other stakeholders.”

Aren’t you giving an alibi to those analysts that do not use discretion in their use of Unique Visitors. By not explicitly labeling data correctly, that data is allowed to be used incorrectly. What if an analyst logged into their reporting tool and found no explicit “Unique Visitors” metric? I think that would be a far greater learning experience than just allowing the term to be misused endlessly.

Jake, the Committee hs tried very hard to make our definitions enlighten more than confuse… that has actually been one of our driving factors. We’re not letting vendors redefine the data, we’re merely reflecting how we as analysts use it. As a web analyst, I am in complete control of whether my tool vendor uses 3rd party cookies, 1st party cookies, or authenticated user IDs to measure unique visitors for my websites, and I choose different methodologies on different sites for different reasons. Because of this, I have to agree with what I think you’re saying in point 3: UV is almost more of a concept since there are multiple ways to measure it, and they are often used in a hierarchical manner within the same tool and on the same website. And it is really up to the analyst to ensure that s/he understands what is being measured, and what is the best way to convey that to other stakeholders. Thanks for your comments.

You have listed four things that Eric completely missed or deliberately ignored simply to make his point. Hopefully it was ignorance and not deliberate.

Unique Visitors measured by analytics tools are not People. But Unique Visitors measured by panels are even worse. ComScore’s panel for the United States is 180k People extrapolated to measure the behavior of 200 million “people” who use the web in the US. Are you sure ComScore / IAB / Eric understand what they are shoveling?

The Analytics industry has rapidly evolved in the last few years, it will continue to do so. It is admirable that the IAB has decided to join the party as well. Rather than mandating and yelling and personally attacking people lets try and collaborate and improve.

Thank you for bringing some rationality to the discussion Angie.

Simon Tu.

2. I’m pretty sure Eric did not say we need to do a “Find and Replace” in all of our reports and replace “Unique Visitors” with “Unique Cookies”. He was saying that we should label data appropriately. By letting vendors (and the WAA) redefine data they are doing a disservice to the data consumers. On that point I will say the WAA is wrong.

3. Unique Visitors won’t exist. It’s just not going to happen. It’s a concept, not data. It is ingrained in Execs so it’s still going to exist, but let the Analyst interpret the data how they need to. The vendor should present the data objectively. The analyst is the one that sprinkles their special sauce to make it relevant to whoever’s reading the report.

You were able to say in thousands of words what I was trying to fit into the 400-600 word space that I had to work with.

Excellent post – you hit every point we’ve discussed ad nauseum.

Thanks, Jodi

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read something in a post (not picking on you here, there are lots of examples) with the reaction “But we talked about that, and chose to do it another way because… I wish they would have talked to someone on the Committee before posting.”

Interesting post/rebuttal and you raise some good points. At this point I suspect it is best to “agree to disagree” about what a standard is, what a “Unique Visitor” is, and what the WAA Standard’s Committee’s response to the IAB “re-definition” should be.

As I did apologize to Jodi I will apologize to you as well: I certainly could have left the WAA entirely out of my post and instead simply evangelized for what I personally believe to be a better, more useful, and more accurate set of definitions (those proposed by the IAB.) I meant no disrespect to your fine work and efforts.

I wish you all the best,

Eric T. Peterson