general questions of Total Unique Visits

[riovv]

I don't get something about Total Unique Visits.

1, If Peter arrives the page on Monday and Tuesday, will Peter be added twice to the Total Unique Visits?

2, If there're only ten unique persons arrived the page on different weekdays, say, the Unique Visits on Mon is 5, Tue is 8, Wed is 10, Thu is 3, Fri is 1, will the Total Unique Visits be 10 or over 10?

[Arne]

Unique Visitors - explained

[riovv]

The description doesn't explain my questions clearly. Maybe I didn't raise my questions clearly. I edit my question below.

Questions:

1, If Peter arrives the page on Mon and Tue, will Peter be added twice to the Total Unique Visits of the week?

2, If there're only ten unique persons arrived the page on different weekdays, say, the Unique Visits on Mon is 5, Tue is 8, Wed is 10, Thu is 3, Fri is 1, will the Total Unique Visits of the week be 10 or over 10?

[rotarysteve]

Odd's are it would be well over 10. There is a setting in your project called "Idle Time Between Visits".
I'm not 100% sure about it, but my interpretation of it is that if the same visitor hits several pages of your site "during/within" the amount of time that you have set, then that visitor will remain one unique visitor.
If the same visitor comes back outside of the time set for Idle Time, then he would increment the unique count again.

Regardless, there is a point in time that the same visitor will increment the unique count over and over again, whether it be 1 hour or 24 hours, In theory, if it is a 24 hour setting, then if I load one page every 24 hours and 1 minute, then each pageload would increment the unique count.

Something else to consider that is true regarding unique visit count, is regarding if the visitors allow their browsers to save cookies. If the visitor does not allow cookies, then for every visit/page load to your site will result in incrementing the unique count regardless of time.

[rotarysteve]

Here are a couple more links that are to Statcounter's Blog and their description of unique visit's.

http://blog.statcounter.com/2009/10/...ors-explained/

http://blog.statcounter.com/2009/11/...ions-answered/

[riovv]

Thanks for the details and the links. It gets to be more complicated to the design of the Unique Visits but I finally got it.

So I would say the summary report from email seems just too simple and inaccurate if many variances occurred to the visits.

[rotarysteve]

Originally Posted by riovv

So I would say the summary report from email seems just too simple and inaccurate if many variances occurred to the visits.

Not an exact measure, but overall is mostly accurate and it does give a very good insight to your visitors. I have mine set to 30 minutes, as I wouldn't think anyone would spend more than 30 minutes on any single page, though I'm considering increasing the time a little bit.

[riovv]

yes, thanks for the idea.