The difference between website visits and visitors (and why it’s important for UK B2B businesses to measure both metrics)

With your business’ website acting as your “shop front”, it’s important to pay attention to monthly footfall as part of your sales and marketing strategy.

Of course, it’s also important to look at what customers do once they arrive at your site: are they merely browsing the shelves, picking up a tin of beans and putting it back down again? Or are they striding down every aisle, filling their trolley with all the lovely products you offer?

• The first metric to measure is: monthly website visits (sessions)
• The second is: monthly website visitors (users).

Are you getting a high enough volume of visits and visitors to then trigger enough conversions and, ultimately, sales for your business?  

Here we explore the meaning of both these metrics; why your monthly website session and user numbers matter; and take a closer look at what average UK B2B mid-sized businesses are measuring for each. 

Visits vs visitors: what’s the difference?

Firstly, let’s define visits and visitors: 

1. A meaningful ‘visit’ to a website can also be known as a ‘session’. A session is when a user actively engages with your website – they’re scrolling, clicking and visiting at least two pages. 
   
   Our marketing Benchmark Groups data shows mid-sized, B2B, UK-based businesses have an average of 3,380 website sessions per month:
   
   
2. A ‘visitor’ can also be known as a ‘user’. This is an individual who arrives at your website for the first time. If they visit your site again that month, they cannot count as a visitor again (as you already knew them) but they can count as another visit/session.
   
   Our marketing Benchmark Groups data shows mid-sized, B2B, UK-based businesses have an average of 2,490 website users per month: 
   
   

Why is it important to measure website visits and visitors? 

Because regular, rolling traffic counts. Whether it’s new or returning traffic, the number of monthly website sessions you get is an indicator of how many people are finding your business online. And sessions show they’re engaging with your brand once they arrive there, not bouncing straight off. 

Databox explains in more detail why both sessions and users are vital to measure:

‘Think of users as the number of unique visitors coming to your website. Once they visit once, they will not be counted again unless they are visiting on a new device or have cleared their cookies. 

Sessions are the number of visits your site has, from both new and returning users. Tracking these metrics… is a simple way to see where users are landing and whether people are staying to engage with content or bouncing off the page.’

Paying attention to your website sessions and users allows you to work out if the volume is high enough to fuel the number of sales you need to make each month.

Is 3,380 visits and 2,490 visitors a month “good”?

For many mid-sized businesses, 3,380 monthly visits and 2,490 monthly visitors would be deemed “good enough”. That’s 2,490 opportunities to convert strangers into leads and customers. As MailChimp identifies in their article about average website conversion rates:

‘A “good” website conversion rate falls between 2% and 5% across all industries. Industry-specific conversion rates vary quite a bit more.’

With the metric averages above, this percentage would translate to between 50-125 leads/customers a month – not bad, right? But it isn’t only about the traffic coming in, it’s about:

• What you do on your website to convert them
• What the nurturing/buying journey is like once they convert
• What your marketing-to-sales handoff process looks like.

In our next blog post, we will be looking at the easy sums businesses can do to work out how many website visits and visitors are enough to fuel their selling machine.

In unpredictable times, website visits are a mid-sized business’ greatest tool – so how many do you need to sustain and grow your business? We’ll reveal all in our next article.