Monthly Visits

Monthly visits is the number of sessions started on the site in a month — the same visit metric as the daily figure, over a larger one-month window.

Monthly visits is the common unit for comparing growth and market benchmarking, because a one-month window smooths daily fluctuation and weekend effects and shows the real trend. But a frequent mistake is summing the month's daily visits and calling it a monthly visitor; visits (sessions) are additive while unique visitors are not, since a person who came on ten days has ten sessions in monthly visits but is one monthly unique visitor. A second point is month comparison: months are not equal in length, and a 31-day month inherently gets more visits than a 28-day one, so a raw comparison of two months without a length correction creates false growth. Monthly growth is therefore better judged against the average daily visits, or against the same month last year, than against the raw prior month.