Unique users and visits on job boards

Unique users and unique visits are often quoted by online recruiters and job boards when talking about themselves.

These stats often suggest how popular a site is. But what are unique users and visits and why are they important?

What are unique users and visits?

According to the International Federation of Audit Bureau of Circulations (IFABC) a visit is “a series of one or more page impressions, served to a valid browser, which ends when there is a gap of 30 minutes or more between successive page impressions for that browser.”

Doesn’t help much, does it? What about a unique user? Well, a unique user is defined as “a unique and valid identifier. Sites may use (i) IP+User-Agent, (ii) Cookie and/or (iii) Registration ID.” Doesn’t help much either, does it?

Okay, let’s try again in English. Let us suppose that you happen to visit whatjobsite. Once here, you read some of the articles and then, having got what you needed, you leave our site. For internet statistical purposes, whatjobsite has had one visit (by you) from one unique user (that’s you too). Later, another person visits whatjobsite. They also read some of the articles and then leave the site. Now, there have been two visits (by you and the new person) and two unique users (you and the new person).

A little later you come back to whatjobsite again. This time you do a search for some job sites and, finding the right one with our zippy search engine, you leave again. Now, for internet statistical purposes, there have been three visits to whatjobsite (two visits by you and one by the other person) but there have only been two unique users/visits (you and the other person). So visits are a count of all the times people come to the site in a defined period while unique visits or unique users is a count of the number of individual people who come to the site in a particular period.

Of course, using the term ‘people’ is not quite accurate. The visit and user statistics actually measure the number of times a particular IP address, or a computer, or a browser cookie, or particular user account is used to view a website in a given period (usually 30 minutes). However, for everyday purposes we can say that users and visits can be seen as people looking at a website.

Why are unique users and visits important for recruiters?

These statistics are valuable to recruiters because they can give an indication of how many people use a particular recruitment website. For example, popular generalist websites like Totaljobs, CV-Library and Reed can have many millions of unique users every month. That means that there are many millions of people using these sites to look for jobs. Clearly, this is good news for a recruiter with a job to fill.

But, of course, that’s not the end of the story. The total number isn’t always the full picture. Specialist sites like oZZle.co.uk, SupplyChainRecruit and CareersinAudit may have many times less unique users per month but they may be the more popular recruiitment websites in their particular specialist areas.

Understanding that we must be careful in how we compare different sites against each other, unique user statistics can be used to evaluate the popularity of a job board. And, of course, the more popular the job board is for your job, the better the chances of recruitment success for you.

Next step? Read the next article in the series

1. Unique users and visits on job boards
2. NEXT>> Registered users on job boards
3. Job application statistics on job boards
4. Email subscribers on job boards
5. CV database statistics on job boards
6. Page impressions and hits
7. Audited statistics on job boards
8. Using statistics to choose a job board