: How can # of unique visitors be more than # of visits? I am confused as heck. When looking at a few individual pages, I am seeing weird results I hope someone can help explain. I am doing

@Karen161

Looks like Google has posted Why a custom report shows more Unique Visitors than Visits in their Help pages.


If you use either a page level dimension (like Page or Page Title) or the Hour dimension in a custom report, you might see the count of Unique Visitors is greater than Visits.

To capture the number of sessions that included a visit to a given page, use the metric Unique Pageviews instead of Visits.


They also give a more in depth answer that explains the details.

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@Ogunnowo487

The overall point is that you are looking for unique visitors and visits for a specific page. Normally you will not see more visitors than visits on a generic report but if you go to report "how many visits and visitors a single page gained" then you can encounter this "confusing" problem.

I know, as Eric stated with the article, that GA counts visits for a page only those that started with that page and not all visits (sessions) that "really" viewed it.

Use unique pageview and you are sure to count ALL sessions/visits that embed at least one pageview of that page.

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@Radia820

I found what I believe is the answer in the link below.
www.michaelwhitaker.com/blog/2010/04/23/unique-visitors-0-visits-and-pages-in-web-analytics/
To detail the answer is quite lengthy, but in summary - for purposes of attribution, google credits a visit at the page level to the first page visited in a single visit. However it credits every page viewed to a unique visitor.

So basically what the visit metric stands for in the report you showed is how many visits started their visit on that page. To find out how many actual VISITS went to a particular page use unique pageviews since it counts pageviews only once, for every visit.

Confusing...yes. However it appears to be the reason.

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@Annie201

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 will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be 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.
support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57164

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@Caterina187

Have a look at this google support article


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 will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be 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.

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