21 Feb 09 Dear Dame

I recently got asked a good question about calculating unique visitors to a particular page without actually having the UV data.

“Can I determine the number of visitors to this page in the following way?

Total Unique Visitors Jan = 100

Total Page Views Jan = 1000

Avg Page View per visitor = 100

Notebook page Jan = 600 page views / 10

Therefore 60 unique visitors visited this page in Jan?

60% conversion.”

It isn’t uncommon to have to extrapolate some things from data that doesn’t quite answer what we want to know, and we can do this by using proxies from what we are measuring, or using relevant trends and applying it to the data we have.

Unfortunately, you can’t really make this assumption – unless you want to be a bit fast and loose with the truth.

The only real way to know this is to actually measure it, and without knowing the specifics of the tool, I’m not sure what it’s capabilities are. In Omniture, you can just turn on a unique visitor correlation to pages. In Google analytics, you can just drill down to the content page and it will tell you the unique views and other juicy info.

I would suggest that if you can’t get this level of detail, you should implement Google analytics as well as what you are currently using, or totally migrate.

As for logic in the question, you can’t say that “Therefore 60 unique visitors visited this page in Jan” because you just don’t know that for a fact. It would be largely dependent on your site structure. For example, if the notebook page was 4 pages deep, then to construct the average of 10 page views per person, you would make up those 10 pages of something like 5 at one page deep 3 at two pages deep, 1 at three pages deep and 1 at 4 pages deep (5 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 10). If that was the makeup of the average visit and the page resided at 4 pages deep, then 600 page views would correlate to 600 unique visitors.