Analytics Glossary

Unique Visitors

How many actual people visited — not how many pages they loaded.

Unique visitors represent the number of distinct individuals who visit your website during a given time period. Unlike page views, unique visitors are deduplicated — if one person visits your site five times in a day, they count as one unique visitor but five page views.

Unique visitors answer the question owners actually care about: how many people saw my business this week? Page views can double just because visitors clicked around more, but unique visitors only grow when new people arrive. That makes this the cleanest metric for judging whether your marketing is reaching a wider audience — and, alongside returning-visitor counts, whether those people come back.

On Growth and Agency plans, Crafty Meerkat identifies unique visitors with a persistent first-party visitor ID, so returning visitors are counted accurately across days; Starter plans use daily fingerprint hashing, a one-way hash that rotates every 24 hours. No personal data is stored either way — no names, no emails, and raw IP addresses are never stored.

How it works

The practical difference between the two counting methods shows up across days. With the persistent visitor ID (Growth, Agency, and every free trial), a customer who visits Monday and again Thursday is one unique visitor for the week, and the dashboard can tell new visitors from returning ones — the full picture the AI Advisor uses for better recommendations. With Starter’s daily rotating hash, that same person counts as unique on Monday and unique again on Thursday, so weekly and monthly unique counts run a little higher and new-vs-returning breakdowns are not available. Either visitor also gets a deterministic friendly name like “Dashing Falcon”, which you can click for their full session history.

How to put it to work

1
Compare visitors to page views
Divide page views by unique visitors on your Analytics overview. Around 2–4 pages per person is typical; a ratio near 1 means most people leave after one page — worth investigating with bounce rate.
2
Watch new vs returning
On Growth and Agency plans, check the returning-visitor share. Growing new visitors means your reach is working; growing returning visitors means people find you worth a second look. A healthy site grows both.
3
Tie growth to a channel
When unique visitors climb, open Referrers and your Campaigns to see which channel brought the new faces — then put next week’s effort there.

Tips from the den

◆Use unique visitors, not page views, when judging whether an ad or newsletter reached new people — page views reward clicking, visitors reward reach.
◆If you compare numbers with Google Analytics, expect small differences: every tool counts visitors slightly differently, and ad blockers affect them unevenly.
◆Your 30-day free trial includes the persistent visitor ID, so you can see accurate returning-visitor data before choosing a plan.

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Common questions

Why are my weekly unique visitors on Starter higher than expected?

Starter identifies visitors with a hash that rotates daily, so the same person visiting on two different days counts as unique both days. Growth and Agency plans use a persistent first-party visitor ID that counts them once across the whole week.

Do unique visitors require cookies or personal data?

No personal data is collected on any plan — no names, emails, or stored IP addresses. Growth and Agency plans use a first-party identifier scoped to your site only; Starter uses a one-way daily hash that cannot be reversed to identify anyone.

Is one person on two devices one visitor or two?

Two. Someone browsing on their phone at lunch and their laptop at night appears as two unique visitors, because there is no personal profile linking the devices — a limitation shared by essentially all privacy-respecting analytics tools.