Blog Advertising and Unique Visitors

One of the biggest miscalculations that wedding blogs make is in relation to their unique monthly visitors.  To be fair, I don't think these bloggers are intentionally sharing false information. I find it is more a matter of them not knowing or understanding how to accurately calculate their monthly unique visitors.

I came across a wedding blog promoting itself to advertisers by saying that they receive a certain (and very high) amount of unique monthly visitors. Curious, since I already knew a bit about the site's history, I did some fact-checking and learned that this claim is simply not true.  (In case you are wondering how I know: website traffic statistics are available for public research, not all of them are limited to the owner's analytics.)

Here's where the error is stemming from: many people are assuming that the unique monthly visitor rate is calculated by adding together the daily unique visitor counts for the entire month.  What this fails to take into consideration is the number of return visitors from one day to the next, thus skewing the monthly total. So for example, if Sally visits your blog on Monday and then again on Thursday, she will be counted as a unique visitor in both Monday's and Thursday's stats.  If you are adding all of the daily totals to get your monthly total, then you are counting Sally's visits more than once. 

If you plan on advertising on a wedding blog or bridal website, and reaching a large audience is part of your strategy, don't be afraid to ask the blog owner for some screen shots of their stats or to do some research of your own on a media kit's claims.  It's important to know all the relevant facts before you spend your marketing dollars.