MarketingSherpa Blog

Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

There are two metrics to look at when you are analyzing the amount of traffic coming to your website — visits and unique visitors.

What’s the difference?

“Visits” refers to the number of times your website or webpage has been visited during a reporting period. It’s important to note that a single person can make multiple visits.

“Unique visitors” refers to the actual number of people (well, sort of, more on that in a bit) who have come to your website or webpage at least once during a reporting period — this number does not increase if a previous visitor returns to a page multiple times.

So, if you visit MarketingSherpa.com 10 times in a day, it is recorded as one unique visitor and 10 visits. If you even refresh a page 10 times, it is counted as 10 visits, one unique visitor.

But, how does Google Analytics (or Adobe Analytics, etc.)  know someone has visited previously? It’s measured with IP addresses and tracking cookies. So, to clarify, if you visit the same site using the same IP address 12 times, it is recorded as one unique visitor and 12 visits.

Does “unique visitors” really tell us the actual number of people visiting our site?

It is important to recognize that these numbers can get cloudy. Many people use different browsers, browse from multiple devices, use multiple IP addresses, or clear their cookies regularly while surfing the web. Additionally, most cookies expire within one month. So, someone navigating to a site through three different browsers will be counted as three unique visitors. Someone who scrolled through a product page on their phone but moved to desktop for purchasing is considered two unique visitors.

Source: Brooks Bell

The great thing about both of these metrics is that when you look at them together, you can roughly see how often people (aka prospective customers) are repeatedly coming to your website.

You can also see a rough average of how many visits each individual coming to your site has. All you have to do is divide the total number of visits by the total number of unique visitors.

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Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

The way we communicate has changed drastically from the days when we had to run to the phone in the kitchen that was *gasp* attached to a wall to call a friend. When we actually had to call someone to ask them out for a date, instead of swiping right or shooting a text.

We have evolved from phone calls to text messages and countless emojis (even animojis). And now, thanks to the popularization of GIFs — quick, bite-sized animated graphics that play over and over again in a loop with no sound — we barely need to use any words at all to communicate how we are feeling and what we are thinking. Even many corporate communication systems, like Slack, have integrated GIFs.

This transformation is not isolated to our personal use — brands and marketers are incorporating this type of visual content into their content strategy and campaigns. Why? Because they drive engagement and clickthrough, in both email and social media.

But what is it about GIFs that makes such a big impression?

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If you’ve ever collaborated with your design team to create a landing page, an email template, print advertisement, etc., they probably sent over a mock-up layout that shows the general aesthetic that the collateral will have. If you looked closely at that mock-up, chances are you saw it filled with text that made no sense (like the one below). Something you may not know? That nonsensical text actually has a name: lorem ipsum.

Lorem ipsum (sometimes referred to as “greeking” or “filler text”) is the standard dummy text used in the publishing and printing industry. Basically, it’s mock text used to represent the copy that will eventually live in a design, template, publication, etc. I read an article on the history of lorem ipsum from priceonomics.com to get the specifics on the topic.

With word length comparable to a real language and commas and periods creating an illusion of grammar, lorem ipsum looks more like a legitimate language than just repeating “text here” over and over or typing a slew of random letters like “skdghwejghsgskjhgdgngowklrgjlsdjgs.” That’s why using it accurately shows designers how much space is available in a layout for text. This way, they can give copywriters specific character counts when they are actually crafting copy.

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Vegas is in the middle of the Mojave Desert of Nevada, and yet you can move from Venice, to New York and over to Paris in 10 minutes.

MarketingSherpa Summit week is the one time every year that we get to bring the MarketingSherpa community together in the middle of Las Vegas to study (and toast to, at the Summit Party) customer-first marketing.

During the day, we work out of the beautiful Aria hotel, and at night, walk out onto the strip past famous structures like the Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace and the Paris Hotel, and it’s easy to see that there is no place else like it. In this morning’s Intro session, Daniel Burstein, Summit Co-host and Director of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, even spoke about the customer-centric thought process behind having penguins in the Flamingo hotel, thriving in the most unlikely of environments.

These structures, sights and scenes make Vegas one of the most popular and attractive destinations in the country. But how many of us think about the men and women who actually make Vegas what it is, by building (and re-building) the glorious hotels that shape the Strip.

Most don’t notice or consider the construction industry at all unless it’s somehow causing an inconvenience or delay in our day. No one glides over bridges and overpasses and thinks about how advanced new infrastructure is.

To change that perspective, construction software company HCSS decided to take on the challenge of getting the men and women that work in construction the recognition they deserve.

Dan Briscoe, Vice President of Marketing, HCSS, spoke today in his Best-in-Show Awards session on how, as marketers, they had to “get over” themselves in order to truly be customer-first.

Elevating their customers would translate into elevating the industry, and as a result, the company.

Dan and his team developed the “I Build America” campaign, which focused on improving the image of the construction industry, infusing the people who work in it with pride and attracting a new generation of talent.

How did they do it?

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We wanted to get you gifts this holiday, but all we have are some GIFs. Our bad!

Here are some more marketing mishaps, one for each night of Hanukkah.

1. When you use best practices on the internet even though they are typically just pooled ignorance…

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