The count of distinct individual people who visited a website within a given period, counted once regardless of how many separate sessions or page views they generated.
Why it matters
Unique visitors gives a more accurate picture of actual audience size than raw session or page view counts, which can be inflated by a smaller number of people visiting repeatedly.
In a sentence
"We had 50,000 sessions last month, but only about 30,000 unique visitors — a meaningful share of our traffic is repeat visits from the same people."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Sessions (see above).
- Synonyms: Unique users.