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I'm facing a weird discrepancy about the unique visitors metric.

In my audience overview report I have ie. 100 visits made by 30 visitors in the period X (the timeframe is not relevant for this issue). Fine. But when I export the data, I find out (no matters about the daily figures) that the unique visitors are 70.

Hope to have made it clear. Any help please?

thanks

user3046283
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  • let me explain better, because the dynamic is more complicated: I mean that we have 2 websites: a desktop and a mobile one. Each website has a dedicated tracking code (UA). Then a third and additional tracking code is applied to have a "global" property. On the latter, I have this discrepancy in Unique visitors, that consists in having fewer unique visitors (ca. 32%) than the sum of the desktop and mobile unique visitors. – user3046283 Feb 14 '14 at 10:51
  • In addition, in the global property in the audience overview, the unique visitors number is, let's say, 100 for a selected period. Now, if I export that data, the row with the total shows a total unique visitors for 140. Also, in a custom report I take the unique visitors by device category. Well, if applied to any timeframe, the sum does not match with the total shown there, while if the tirmeframe selected is yesterday, the figures match. – user3046283 Feb 14 '14 at 10:52
  • I am wondering and considering whether several issues are affecting this accout, such as wrong UA-code in few sections of the website and sampling. I'd like to have some help to shed light on that. thanks- – user3046283 Feb 14 '14 at 10:53

2 Answers2

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The reason for this is that GA reports are de-duplicating the unique visitors. Let me explain:

  • You have a website with Page A and Page B.
  • You have 10 total unique visitors coming, 10 of them see Page A, 6 of them see Page B.
  • If you then look at the reports, you will see that the total number of unique visitors is 10. However, if you run a custom report that will tell you how many unique visitors saw each page, it will have two rows with Page A = 10 visitors, and Page B = 6 visitors.
  • The aggregated number at the top of the report table should be still correct (= 10), because the reporting engine in GA takes care of this and makes sure there are no duplicates.
  • However, if you export the raw data and sum it up by yourself, you will get different totals (in this case, that would probably be 10 + 6 = 16).

So to answer your question - trust Google Analytics, it will make you life (and job) easier :-)

Petr Havlik
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  • it seems this de-duplication only occurs in the report on screen and in the pdf export. When I download xls the total seems to be the total of the individual pages. – Hans Dash Apr 04 '19 at 13:27
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If you check the different reports on the GA website you will notice that they use, Visits, Visitors, Pageviews, and unique Pageviews. They are all tracked differently, depending on what you are trying to show its best to know the difference between them.

You can read all about it on here

Visits vs. Visitors

Analytics measures both visits and visitors in your account. Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity is attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session.

The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.

Pageviews vs. Unique Pageviews

A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a visitor clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

A unique pageview, as seen in the Content Overview report, aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

Google Analytics getTotalsForAllResults inconsistent for different dimensions

Community
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Linda Lawton - DaImTo
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  • the question is related to discrepancy in unique visitors, which I tried to address in my answer. Is there anything missing? – Petr Havlik Feb 13 '14 at 10:01