Unique Visits or Monthly Unique Visits, is a metric you will see on Online coverage articles. This figure shows the estimated number of people who visit the website/outlet that your article was featured on, in a monthly period. Please note, this is not the number of people who have seen the article, just the number that visit the site as a whole.
How do you get this number?
Our data partner, SimilarWeb, track the number of people who visit a site. To ensure we've collected a full month's data, we'll show the Unique Visits from SimilarWeb two months prior to when you import a clip to a book (eg if you import a clip in May, we'll show March's data as a guide to how many people visit the website in a month).
Why is this number different to another service I use?
It might be because the other service is showing Total Visits and not Unique Visits. Total Visits will track every time the site is accessed, so if the same person goes to the site five times, then that will track five views. Unique Visits only counts each person once, so if only one person has been to the site then that is one view, even if they accessed it multiple times.
The other confusion can be when the data is collected. Our data comes from two months before the date you import the clip. This ensures we always get a complete month of data. Other services may show a rolling 30 days or the previous months data, for example.
Further Reading