Marketing

Unique Visitors: Understanding and Targeting Your Competitors’ Audience

Unique Visitors: Understanding and Targeting Your Competitors’ Audience

What is the unique visitors metric?

Unique visitors is a website metric that shows the total number of visitors to a site; counting only their first visit. If they return to the site at a later time, any additional visits are not counted in this number.

As one of the most telling website KPIs, it’s something every business should track and compare with competitors’ website and engagement metrics.

Now you know what it means, let’s talk about why it matters so much.

What is unique visitors used for?

This standard engagement metric is essential for analyzing web traffic and planning your digital strategy . It’s also referred to as UVPM, which is short for unique visitors per month. Google Analytics is considered one of the most common analytics tools; it provides a unique visitors metric for your site. With Similarweb’s analytics platform, you can also examine your competitors’ unique visitor stats, along with other useful insights that allow you to drill down and unpack their successes online.

Unique visitors comes in handy in a range of situations, including:

  • To data and BI analysts tracking online activity in their industry or competitive landscape .
  • Doing competitive analysis of a rival’s website.
  • For publishers assessing the exposure of a competitor’s piece of content.
  • Both strategy and investment teams measure a brand’s reach.
  • Benchmarking industry traffic and engagement stats.
  • To see which companies achieve success with inbound marketing.
  • For advertisers who need to quantify the impact of another company’s campaign.

Why is the unique visitors metric important for your business?

To understand the exposure and reach of a website, marketers and researchers look at page views. Similarweb’s equivalent, the number of visits received by a website is a key metric for analyzing that website’s traffic. This information is critical, for example:

– If you are a publisher and want to show the number of impressions an ad will receive on your website.

– If you are part of the user journey team at an ecommerce website seeking to capitalize on each visit as an opportunity to convert a visitor into a buying customer.

To help you better understand a website’s audience analysis , such as size and reach, you need to look at the unique visitors metric. In the simplest of terms, this number represents how many pairs of eyes viewed a particular website during a specified period.

Dividing the number of visits by the number of unique visitors yields the number of visits per individual user (also provided by Similarweb), which you can use to analyze engagement rates on a website and understand how many times every single user visited that website.

calculate number of visitors per user

Unique visitors, visitors, and visits – what’s the difference?

It’s easy to get confused with these web analytics metrics. Although they’re similar, it’s critical to understand the difference.

Visits: Counts the number of single visits to a website or page, regardless of their origin. The same visitor may have several visits to the same page.

Similarweb calculates total visits within a defined period and region. Each time a visitor accesses one or more pages, it counts as a visit. Subsequent views of the same page are included until the user is inactive for at least 30 minutes.

Similarweb total visits metric

Visitors: In Google Analytics, visits from the same browser or terminal are defined as coming from the same visitor if they arrive on the same day . In other words. “Visitors” count the users that visit your site in a single day. The following day, the system starts counting again. Whoever was at your site before is not recognized as a returning visitor but simply counted as a visitor again.

Unique Visitors: The system recognizes the visit’s origin – the visitor – over a specified period. Each visitor visiting your site or page within the specified period is counted only once. Let’s take a closer look at the methodology Similarweb and Google Analytics uses to identify website unique visitors and collect the information.

Similarweb unique visitors metric

How are Unique Visitors calculated?

There is no standard in the market for measuring the number of unique visitors; hence there are slight discrepancies between tools.

  • Google Analytics and its cookies

Most of you are familiar with Google’s definition: “Unique visitors is the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.”

To be more precise, Google identifies the same IP address by placing a cookie. Google can’t identify the actual person. If the same visitor enters from a different device or browser, each will count as a unique visitor. Another scenario that renders this method slightly inaccurate: users can erase cookies, or different family members can enter a site from the same device and browser.

  • Similarweb Unique Visitors Per Month (UVPM) identification method

Unlike other traffic analysis tools , Similarweb does not rely on cookies , which are often considered an unstable data collection mechanism, as explained above.

As a result, cookie-based technologies tend to overestimate the number of unique visits; they will often show higher numbers than the Similarweb software.

Similarweb collects data from a variety of sources, including a large panel composed of users who share their anonymous clickstream data. Each device in the panel receives its own unique ID, which translates into a unique user.

Under Monthly Unique Visitors , you will see the number of users who visited the specified web location one or more times during the monthly period.

Similarweb comparison of unique visitors between competitors

  • Similarweb Daily Unique Visitors – are they different?

Again, Similarweb’s technology does not use cookies to identify Unique Users; therefore, the differentiation between a visitor and a unique visitor isn’t really relevant. We refer to visitors as daily unique visitors.

Unique visitors function as a basis for many of our traffic and engagement metrics. We calculate unique visitors for desktop and mobile web, which means the traffic for the calculator is the sum of both.

Monitoring daily unique visitors lets you improve website stickiness and engagement, evaluate peak traffic days, and much more.

  • Closely related metric: Visits per Unique Visitor

The next metric to look at in your traffic analysis is Visits per Unique Visitor if you want to understand your unique visitors‘ behavior and engagement. With Similarweb, you can choose a time frame and region and monitor how many visits a user made and how many pages they viewed on average.

But that’s a topic for another post. Read here how to leverage Page Views and benchmark against your competitors .

How to use unique visitors metric

How to use competitor’s unique visitors metric to amplify your digital strategy

Here’s one thing to remember about your target audience : It’s also your competitors’ target audience. So if you want to increase your unique visitors, you need to look at successful best-in-class companies along with players in your market showing significant growth.

Step 1 – Establish key competitors to analyze

First, identify which competitors generate the most unique visitors. They could be industry leaders or rising stars. At this point, it’s not about doing a full-blown competitive analysis, we’re simply going to find those people showing the highest number of unique visitors.

Ready? Then, let’s begin.

Action: List between 5-10 competitors to analyze as part of this task.

Tip : You can use Similarweb to identify market leaders and high-growth sites in your industry.

Step 2 – Establish the industry average

Understanding the industry average is a great starting point when setting any goals. In the next section, we list a few industry averages for the UVPM metric. But to gain an apples-for-apples representation and build a measurable strategy; establish your industry benchmarks.

Tip: In the same place on the Similarweb platform you can grab a snapshot of your industry benchmarks.

Industry benchmarks for UVPM

Here, you can view the standard industry benchmark for unique visitors, monthly visits, visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate. If you want, you can drill down and analyze specific competitors to get an idea of their individual wins and losses.

Step 3 – Do a quick competitive analysis of traffic and engagement stats

Unique visitors is one of the crucial engagement metrics to include in your analysis. But, it doesn’t always show the full story. At this point, you also need context, as this is where the biggest opportunity to find insights exist.

Action: Look at key metrics, like:

  • Unique visitors
  • Page visits
  • Bounce rate
  • Time on page

You can use these additional engagement metrics to get a more granular view and record the metrics to give you a point-in-time view that you can refer back to.

Here’s a quick example of how this exercise can help you find opportunities to grow the number of unique visits to your site.

If your number of unique visitors is higher than that of your competitors, but your bounce rate is also higher, this raises the question of how well your site meets the visitors’ expectations.

  • Are the visitors you attract the right persona for your business?
  • Are your meta descriptions aligned with the content on the page or do they mislead?
  • Is your site navigation simple and is it easy for people to find what they need?
  • Are your consumer journeys considered and clearly mapped?

There are a lot of questions you can ask once you unpack these metrics. But before you can break things down, it’s important you grab these other metrics to give you a complete picture of what’s happening on a site.

Step 4 – Examine marketing channels that drive the most unique visitors

Next, review rival’s marketing channels to see which drives the most traffic and unique visitors to their site.

Helpful: Make sure you record your findings in an easy format. Our downloadable competitive analysis frameworks are handy for this purpose.

Let’s say competitor A receives a significant amount of traffic from display ads; while your ad campaign performance is average. Rather than comparing all your competitor’s ads, you can now focus on analyzing this particular company’s campaigns because you know they work.

  • Which keywords they target
  • What they offer
  • The types of CTAs they use
  • How they design and word their ads

Similarly, you might discover a rival with a high number of social referrals, specifically from one platform. You can again, hone in and unpack their social strategy to emulate their success and get more unique visitors to your site.

Similarweb marketing channels overview

Using Similarweb, you can view the marketing channels any business uses to drive traffic to their site. Along with each channel’s relative success. By clicking on any channel – let’s take display ads as an example, you can drill down even further to see the types of creatives being used, top publishers , landing pages, and more.

You can use the information from this process can help fine-tune your digital strategy. And help you understand your market position in all aspects of website traffic to identify areas of improvement too.

What is a good number of unique visitors based on my industry?

Before we answer this question, let’s remember that even companies in the same industry can be very different, to the point they often pursue different goals. A fashion website offering exclusive designer accessories does not need to generate the same amount of unique visitors as a popular consumer brand of affordable clothing.

Measuring unique visitors to your site is essential as an indicator of how successful you are driving traffic to your site . But it would be a mistake to stop there. What’s even more important is the quality of your traffic.

So, what are considered high-quality visitors for you? Those who will buy your products, use your service, engage with your website, and return for more. This is your target audience – and to attract them, you need to know who they are and what they are looking for. Successful competitors with the same target audience already know . That’s why they are a perfect place for you to start.

Similarweb’s dataset provides information that identifies your website’s demographics and your users’ online behavioral patterns.

You are not operating in a bubble, and the audience is not yours alone. Once you understand that, you also understand that viewing the stats for your own site, as Google Analytics lets you do, does not provide you with the full picture.

To get you started, here are the industry benchmarks we promised:

Average monthly Unique Visitors per key industries

Below are the monthly unique visitors benchmarks for five key industries. It’s important to check the changes on a monthly basis to ensure you’re always reviewing the most up-to-date figures.

Average monthly unique visitors for ecommerce and shopping websites, Aug 2022

unique visitors benchmarks August 2022

Based on the top 100 ecommerce sites globally, the average number of unique visitors in the ecommerce industry is 122.5 million.

Average monthly unique visitors for finance websites, Aug 2022

Unique visitor benchmarks August 2022 for the finance industry

Based on the top 100 finance sites globally, the average number of unique visitors in the finance industry is 311.2 million.

Average monthly unique visitors for news and media websites, Aug 2022

unique visitors benchmarks August 2022

Based on the top 100 sites globally, the average number of unique visitors in the news and media industry is 410.7 million.

Average monthly unique visitors for CPG websites, Aug 2022

Unique visitor benchmarks August 2022 for the cpg industry

Based on the top 100 sites globally, the average number of unique visitors in the CPG industry is 1.166 million.

Average monthly unique visitors for TV and Streaming websites, Aug 2022

Unique visitor benchmarks August 2022 for tv and streaming

Go a Step Further with Similarweb

Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence can help with every stage of your analysis. And, if you’re interested, you can dig a little deeper, and discover audience demographics of the unique visitor metrics – either for your own site or that of your rivals.

In each stage of the 4-step process, you can use Similarweb to quickly view and record key website and engagement metrics. If you want to quickly track your performance or check in on how your rivals are performing at any point in time – Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence should be your tool of choice.

To get under the hood and explore the demographics of any site’s visitors, you can use the audience analysis tool to view things like:

Here, you see a complete set of demographics for a site. This includes traffic share by country, bounce rates, visit duration, page views, growth, and traffic share . Next, you get to see gender and age stats, visitor browsing behaviors, and interests.

Audience Overlap

If you want to benchmark unique visitors with key players in a market, the audience overlap feature is the quickest and easiest way to visualize how you stack up.

Similarweb audience overlap

Here, you can compare up to five sites at a time, and see the respective UVPM for each company. At a glance, you can view audience overlap, which is the cross-visitation of a shared audience, and unreached potential visitors too.

When combined with your initial unique visitors analysis, traffic & engagement – these demographics give you x-ray vision into any site, its marketing strategies, and its target audience.

I know it’s a lot of data – but you know what they say?

Wrapping up: Unique Visitors

For any business, the unique visitors metric is a powerful KPI. It measures how successful (or not) a company is at driving new traffic to its website.

However, just looking at UVPM alone is not enough to prove success or improve performance. It’s one piece of a larger puzzle that can only be understood when complete.

Follow the steps we’ve outlined, and start leveraging the unique visitor metric to analyze competitors and outline a plan to increase your net-new traffic – today.

Boost Your Market Research with Similarweb

Enjoy 360° visibility into your industry and instantly adapt to market changes

What are unique visitors?

A unique visitor is a person who has visited a website at least once and is counted only once in the reporting time period.

What does UVPM stand for?

UVPM is short for unique visitors per month. It’s a common website and engagement benchmark that tells you how many unique visitors came to a site. It excludes repeat visitors and only counts their first visit.

How do you analyze unique visitors?

To analyze unique visitors, divide the number of visits by the number of unique visitors to yield the number of visits per individual user.

What is a high-quality visitor?

A high-quality visitor is one that will buy your products, use your service, engage with your website, and return for more.

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unique page visits

Page Views vs. Visits: What's The Difference? We Break It Down

Marjorie Munroe

Published: December 29, 2021

When it comes to your website reporting, it’s important to know exactly what you’re tracking and what the metric means.

Computer on desk showing page views, page visits, and other website metrics

If you’re using HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics tool , you may have noticed the following metrics in your dashboard: page views, page visits, page sessions. So what’s the difference between these three? Let’s dive in.

Understanding Page Views vs. Visits

A page view occurs when a page on your website is loaded or reloaded whether the user was already on your page or came from an external page. A page visit, on the other hand, only occurs when someone lands on your site from an external page, such as Google or another website.

So technically, every page visit is a page view, but the same is not true the other way around.

It’s important to know this difference, as it can greatly impact your understanding of audience behavior and page performance.

Without this knowledge, you might think that high page views is an indicator of a high-performing website but that’s not always the case. You’ll need to look at more metrics, like page sessions, unique page views, page visits, and other metrics to get a full picture.

Now that we broke that down, we’re going to further explain each metric in detail. Before we get there, it’s important to understand what a session is, as that can help your understanding of other website metrics.

What is a session?

A session is a measurement of visitor engagement that groups together analytics activities taken by a single visitor on your website. It expires after 30 minutes of inactivity.

It works by grouping together the actions taken by visitors as they navigate through your site. This includes the pages they are viewing, the elements they engage with (Think CTAs, forms, or events.)

The time-sensitive element of a session allows you to drill into engagement and traffic on your site.

Here’s an example: A visitor lands on your website’s homepage by clicking on a link from a blog post. They spend some time scrolling down the page, navigating to your product page, and even reading your "About Us" page. Then, they decide to leave the website.

Ten minutes later, the same visitor is still thinking about your product and decides to return directly to your pricing page. All of these actions would count as one session.

Even though the visitor completely left your site, they have not been inactive for more than 30 minutes, so the second visit to your website is recorded as a continuation of their original engagement to your site. If the visitor chose to return after that session has elapsed, their visit would kick off a new session.

How to Understand the Page Views of a Website

A page view is when a page on your site is loaded by a browser.

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Page Views vs Unique Visitors: What’s More Important?

It depends on your objectives and audience. let’s start with the basics..

Joel Varty

What is a Page View?

A page view is triggered when any page is loaded by any visitor to your site. For example, if you click on a link and the page loads, you have triggered a page view. If you click the link 20 times today, it will count as 20 page views.

What is a Unique Visitor?

A unique visitor is an individual user who has accessed your site. It is determined by the IP address of the computer or device that the user is browsing from, combined with a cookie on the browser they are using. No matter how many visits a visitor makes if he is on the same device and the same browser, only one unique visitor is counted. For example, if you visit this link once today, Google Analytics will count this as one unique visitor. If you come back to this site 20 more times today, you will still count as one unique visitor. If you visit the site from another computer or device (or another browser), you will count as a new unique visitor.

Page Views vs. Unique Visitors – which one matters most?

Pageviews are important for publishers because each page view tallies with an ad impression for each ad on the page. If your ads are sold on a cost-per-thousand views (CPM) basis, this is an important number for you to grow. It's tempting to make sacrifices to the user experience in order to increase page views. For example, an image gallery that loads each new image seamlessly provides a better experience for the user but will cut down on page views. It's important to find a balance so you don't alienate your audience.

The unique visitors metric gives you a sense of the size of your audience. The relative importance of this depends on the purpose of your site or publication. If you are a brand, you may want to maximize the number of people that come to your site, with little regard for how many pages they access, as long as they follow your chosen path through the site. If you are a niche publisher, you may not have a huge audience, but they may show loyalty and engagement by clicking deep into the site and generating page views.

Watch Your Bounce Rate

At the end of the day, the most important factor for growing your page views and unique visitors is content. If your content is not engaging and relevant to your users, they are going to "bounce" and never come back. The "bounce rate" is the percentage of visitors who come to your site and leave within a few seconds. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors didn't like what they saw or didn't find what they were looking for.

Time on Page Indicates Engagement

The amount of time spent on the page indicates whether users are actually reading or watching what you're serving up. The higher the average time on page, the more engaged your audience is on that particular page. As a publisher, increasing this metric provides leverage to increase your ad rates because the ad impression time is longer.

How to Improve Page Views and Unique Visitors With Headless CMS 

Although there are lots of promotional and SEO tricks that can help you improve your KPIs, if you have the wrong tech stack, you're already 10 steps behind your competitors. 

Many CMS out there severely limit your ability to tank on SERP. Why? The primary issue is site speed. Traditional CMS, like WordPress, are notoriously slow. With Search engines increasingly pushing lighthouse scores, your site has to be fast! 

Headless CMS helps with this! Because it's built with Jamstac architecture, it is the fastest alternative on the market! 

7 Effective Ways to Personalize Websites

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About the Author

Joel is CTO at Agility CMS, a SaaS headless content management platform that combines flexible and fast Headless architecture with familiar and easy Authoring tools for editors.

Joel  has over 20 years of experience in customer relationship management, product management, and has embraced cloud technology as a ground-breaking concept over a decade ago.

When it comes to cloud computing, development, and software architecture, Joel is as good as they come. Beyond his knowledge, Joel's diligence is enviable.

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Page Views vs Visits: What’s the Difference (Beginner’s Guide)?

John Hughes

Tools like Google Analytics are essential for any website owner. However, if you’re new to tracking analytics, trying to interpret all the metrics on offer can seem overwhelming. For instance, the difference between page views vs visits can be hard to understand, as the terms sound very similar.

It’s important to clear up this confusion and know what you’re tracking, in order to make data-driven decisions. Fortunately, learning the distinctions between these two metrics isn’t hard, and it may change how you perceive your website’s success.

In this article, we’ll explore page views vs visits and discuss whether they can impact your search engine optimization (SEO) . We’ll also show you where to find these numbers in Google Analytics. Let’s go!

Understanding page views vs visits

A page view occurs whenever someone loads your site in their web browser. For instance, let’s say that a visitor finds your blog post through a search engine. However, one of their browser extensions prevents some of the content from displaying correctly, so they have to reload the page. In that instance, your analytics report will register two page views, even though the same visitor generated them (and in a short period of time).

On the other hand, a page visit happens whenever someone reaches your site from an external source, outside of your website’s domain . For instance, if a user finds your article online and then reloads the page, that still counts as one visit. However, if they navigate away from your website, search for a new keyword in Google, and then land on your page again, this will count as two visits.

To make sense of these metrics, it’s also important to take a look at your site’s ‘sessions.’ A session is the total time a user spends on your website within a certain period. During one session, your analytics tool will typically track all activities such as views and engagement with elements or forms.

A session typically expires after 30 minutes of inactivity ( at least as Google Analytics defines “sessions ). It’s a useful metric to track, as it can give more context to your views and visits.

Why understanding page views vs visits matters for your website

The primary reason these two metrics matter is that they can make you aware of potential problems on your site. For instance, contrary to popular belief, high page views don’t always mean you’re reaching a broad audience.

For example, suppose that your page views are high while visits are low. That could indicate possible user experience (UX) issues on your website. Your visitors might find your navigation confusing , or be unable to locate the information they need, causing them to visit the same pages repeatedly.

On the other hand, some pages might experience high views due to the nature of the content. For instance, readers tend to refer to instructional materials multiple times, so your tutorials might show higher views than other kinds of pages.

In some cases, high page views are a desirable metric, especially if you monetize your site with pay-per-view (PPV) ads. However, it’s generally best to strike a balance between page views and visits, in order to ensure that you’re providing the best possible experience on your site.

On the other hand, high page visits are generally positive, as they indicate that your website is popular. However, if your visits are high while the views are low, it could mean that your audience is not staying around long enough to convert. If that’s the case, it’s worth reviewing your CTAs and value proposition, to make sure they’re clear and engaging.

How page views and visits impact SEO

As isolated metrics, page views and visits are unlikely to be direct ranking factors. However, they might still influence your SEO to some degree. Search engines can use these numbers to calculate other significant tanking factors, such as the UX on your site.

For example, Google bots might interpret high page views as a sign that your website is popular. Organic traffic spikes can significantly boost your SEO, especially if referred from high-authority sites. However, the exact formula behind this calculation is unknown, so we can’t be such just how influential these metrics are.

What we do know is that Google favors websites that are engaging and easy to navigate. A high page view to visits ratio generally indicates that users are spending a lot of time on your site, which is a positive ranking factor. However, if your high page views result from poor UX or irrelevant content, that could negatively impact your SEO.

How to measure page views and visits with Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you a wealth of information about your website. Provided that you’ve inserted your tracking code correctly (or used a Google Analytics plugin ), you can track all activities on your site, including page views and visits.

Note that Google Analytics uses slightly different terminology to describe visits. In general, it treats visits as ‘sessions’, and unique visitors as ‘users’. The latter metric is also broken down into two categories: new and returning visitors. This can all be a little confusing at first, but it helps to remember that ‘sessions’ will always be equal to or higher than ‘users’ (as the same person can visit multiple times).

You can access these details via Audience > Overview :

Tracking page views and visits with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics also enables you to track new and returning visitors in more detail. When you navigate to Behavior > New vs. Returning , you can compare metrics such as the average session duration, bounce rate, and conversions:

Comparing new and returning visitors on Google Analytics.

Note that you can also track a metric called ‘new users,’ which is not the same as ‘new visitors’. Google explains that it measures new user activity based on cookie usage, however, so these metrics will be very similar.

To learn more, check out our guide to the Google Analytics interface .

The concept of page views vs visits can seem confusing at first. However, once you understand the difference, it can help you identify potential issues on your website. For instance, high page views could indicate that your visitors can’t find the information they need, so it’s worth tracking it in conjunction with other data.

Let’s quickly recap the distinction between these two metrics:

  • A page view occurs whenever a browser loads your site. Therefore, one visitor can generate many page views.
  • A visit occurs whenever someone arrives at your page from an external source, such as Google search results or another website.

To start tracking all of these metrics, you can add Google Analytics to your site or use another web analytics tool.

Do you have any questions about page views vs visits? Let us know in the comments section below!

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John is a self-taught WordPress designer and developer. He has been working with the CMS for over a decade, and has experience operating as a freelancer and as part of an agency. He’s dabbled in everything from accessible design to website security. Plus, he has extensive knowledge of online business topics like affiliate marketing.

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Home » Unique Visitors

CRO Glossary

Unique Visitors

  • Definition last updated: 30/01/2024
  • Definition first published: 06/01/2023

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Imagine knowing the true size of your audience, their behavior, and the impact of your marketing efforts. How powerful would that make you feel? How much better your campaigns could be? It’s time to embrace the power of tracking unique website visitors. In this entry, we’ll delve into the benefits of this essential metric and how it can revolutionize your online presence. Get ready to unlock a world of opportunities and take your business to new heights.

What Are Unique Visitors?

In marketing, the unique visitors’ metric measures (and counts) the number of distinct individuals visiting a page or multiple pages on your website in a given time interval – regardless of how often they requested those pages.

Note: this metric is different than the number of visits, which shows how many times your pages are visited, regardless of how many visitors land on your website.

Unique visitors are counted only once, regardless of how many times they visit the website during that period.

This means that if a user visits your website and browses through two other additional other pages, leaves your website, and returns to see more pages, he is counted as a single individual user (“unique visitor”).

To understand the concept better, let’s say you have a fashion online retailer called “FashionFab.”

Unique visitors would represent the count of different website visitors who land on the FashionFab site within a selected time (such as a day, a week, or any other defined period.)

Let’s assume FashionFab had 500 unique visitors in a day.

This means that 500 different individuals visited the website on that particular day. These are unique visitors to your website, regardless of whether they visited multiple times or stayed on the site for an extended duration.

If the same person visits the website multiple times within the defined time frame, they are still counted as only one unique visitor.

Unique visitors are a vital metric for online retailers as they provide insights into the size and reach of their audience .

By analyzing unique visitor data over time, fashion online retailers can track trends, evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, measure the impact of website updates, and understand customer engagement.

How Are Unique Visitors Different From Total Visits or Pageviews?

It’s important to note that unique visitors are different from total visits or page views.

Since the terms are also mistakenly used interchangeably, let’s take a closer look at how pageviews, total visits, and unique visitors differ, emphasizing the different use cases for each one.

Total Visits

This metric measures the overall count of visits to your website, including multiple visits by the same individuals .

Total visits indicate the volume of traffic received by the website, helping retailers understand the overall popularity and demand for their site.

At the same time, monitoring total visits can help retailers single out peak traffic periods. Knowing when the website is going to be the most crowded allows you to optimize your website infrastructure and ensure it can handle incoming traffic without performance issues.

Last but not least, total visits reveal trends and paths in user behavior, delivering insights into navigation patterns and popular pages.

These insights can be further used to improve the website’s user experience and optimize content placement to offer more relevant and enjoyable user experiences.

Pageviews are t he number of times web pages on a website have been viewed , including multiple views by the same visitors.

The metric can help online retailers identify their most popular and frequently accessed pages .

The next step after finding them is using the insights to guide their decisions about content creation. It could either mean highlighting popular products, improving underperforming pages, or using a different approach altogether. Pageviews are also helpful in evaluating the success of ad campaigns . By tracking the number of pageviews on pages where ads are displayed, retailers can assess the effectiveness and engagement of their advertising efforts (whether on Social Media or the Google Ad network.)

Higher page views for specific pages can indicate that users are exploring multiple pages, spending more time on the site, and potentially being more engaged with the brand. In this case, pageviews can become a proxy for user engagement and interest in the website’s content.

Evidently, there’s more to say about each metric, but as a short & sweet rundown, this was the gist of it. To recap:

  • unique visitors measure the count of distinct individuals visiting a website
  • total visits represent the overall number of visits (including repeat visits)
  • pageviews track the number of times web pages are viewed.

Each metric comes with valuable insights into different facets of website performance, user behavior, or audience engagement. We recommend you use them together, each for its own strengths, to make data-driven decisions and optimize your strategies accordingly.

Why Is Measuring Unique Visitors Important?

Measuring unique visitors is critical for eComm & Retail businesses, as this metric offers relevant and profitable insights into how their website is performing. Let’s take a closer look at why tracking unique visitors is a big deal and how it benefits you.

First off, knowing the number of unique visitors gives you an idea of how significant your audience is and how far your brand reaches.

It’s like a popularity assessment for your website. When you track unique visitor data, you can figure out if your marketing campaigns and ads are bringing in new visitors and expanding the customer base.

But it’s not just about the numbers.

It never was.

Unique visitor data is also a goldmine for personalization.

You can dig into this data to understand individual visitors and then tailor your website content, product recommendations, and marketing messages to suit each person’s preferences.

Personalizing the experience makes visitors feel more engaged and increases the likelihoods of them purchasing form you, consequently boosting your conversions .

Speaking of purchases…

Tracking unique visitors helps you see how well your website is converting visitors into customers .

Comparing the number of unique visitors with the number of actual conversions, can help you can figure out if your website is doing a good job of turning visitors into buyers.

This knowledge is key for improving conversion rates and finding ways to boost sales.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Unique visitor data also uncovers crucial insights about your audience.

For example, you can learn about where their visitors are coming from, what devices they use, and when they’re most active. This type of insight into the user behaviour leads to smarter decisions about content, marketing strategies, and website improvements.

It’s all about catering to the audience in the best possible way.

Last but not least, tracking unique visitors allows you to track your progress over time.

By comparing unique visitor data from different periods, you can spot trends, see if certain events or campaigns have ever had an impact, and measure the success of your strategies.

This helps you make informed decisions for the future and keeps them on the path to growth.

So, measuring unique visitors is a big deal.

It gives you insights into your audience size, marketing effectiveness, personalization opportunities, conversion rates, and overall performance. With this knowledge, retailers you can optimize your strategies, create a better shopping experience, and watch the businesses thrive.

How to Track Unique Visitors

So, you’re now sold and want to track unique visitors to your website?

Awesome! Let’s walk you through the “how,” step by step:

Get Yourself an Analytics Tool

First things first, choose a web analytics tool that suits your needs.

You’ve got options such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, but you can use any tool of your preference – here’s a handy guide for the most popular ones out there.

Think of these tools like your trusty sidekicks in tracking unique visitors and providing insightful reports.

Upload in the Tracking Code

Once you’ve signed up for your tool of preference, you’ll receive a tracking code snippet, which you need to add to your website.

Find the </head> tag in your website’s code and slip the tracking code just before it, to make sure everything works smoothly.

Let’s Talk Unique Visitor Tracking

Now, within your analytics tool, it’s time to enable the magical power of unique visitor tracking.

This usually involves enabling cookies, which help identify and track individual visitors.

To maximize your chances of users accepting cookies, think of a clever copy, persuading visitors to click “accept.”

It’s like giving your website a secret handshake with your visitors. Don’t be boring or ordinary about it – use your imagination!

Time to Define

An important step is deciding the time frame you want to track unique visitors.

Do you want daily updates, weekly snapshots, or maybe a custom period?

It’s all connected to your goals and objectives. We recommend you sync unique visitors tracking with any campaign you might be rolling, to ensure you’re getting useful, unbiased insights.

Enter the Analytics Dashboard

Already on Step 5?

Great, you’ve done the setup.

Now, it’s time to dive into your analytics tool’s dashboard. Look out for sections or reports that say “Unique Visitors” or “Audience” to find the insights you need.

Unleash Your Inner Detective (or Data Scientist)

Now it’s time analyze and interpret the unique visitor data in front of you.

You’ll discover cool stuff like the number of unique visitors, where they’re from, what devices they’re using, and how they found your website.

Getting this type of insights is like peeking into your audience’s lives. You get a glimpse of this person’s personality and you can use it to orchestrate better campaigns and experiences.

Spotting Trends and Changes

Compare the unique visitor data over different time periods.

Look for patterns, trends, and any changes in audience size or engagement to get insights about audience behavior.

Keep an eye on these metrics to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and site updates.

Power Up Your Decisions

Armed with all this data, it’s time to make some killer decisions.

Adjust your marketing strategies, optimize your website content, give visitors personalized experiences, and boost those conversion rates.

By following these steps, you’ll be a pro at tracking unique visitors, armed with insights that’ll help you understand your audience, level up your website, and grow your business.

Note: Don’t forget to respect privacy regulations and ensure you’re doing things right when it comes to data protection. And always keep your analytics implementation up to date, so you’re tracking unique visitors accurately.

unique visitors

What Are the Limitations of Measuring Unique Visitors?

As good asmeasuring unique visitors could be for business, it’s essential to be aware of some limitations which can impact the accuracy of the data and how you interpret it. So, let’s dive into them:

Perhaps the biggest limitation is that t racking unique visitors relies on cookies .

But here’s the thing, some people delete or block cookies, which messes up the tracking. So, you might end up with inaccurate numbers and data that doesn’t truly reflect your visitor count .

At the same time, a lot of people will switch between devices or browsers when they’re visiting your website.

Each device or browser generates a different ID, which can lead to multiple counts for the same person. It can get messy and make your unique visitor count all wonky and inaccurate.

Now, privacy is a hot topic these days. Some people take measures to protect their privacy, like using browser extensions or opting out of tracking, meaning they won’t be counted as unique visitors, which can impact your data accuracy.

Sharing is caring, right? Well, when it comes to shared devices or networks, things can get tricky. Multiple users accessing a website from the same device or network might be counted as a single unique visitor. It can mess up your numbers and give you an inflated count.

Choosing the right time frame is crucial too . Picking a too short or too long time frame can skew your results, as you want to capture the full picture without including irrelevant or inactive visitors .

Keep in mind that not everyone is trackable. Some visitors disable cookies, use private browsing modes, or have ad-blockers, so they might slip through the tracking cracks and not be counted as unique visitors.

And let’s not forget about cross-device tracking. When people hop from one device to another without a consistent identifier, it’s hard to attribute visits and behavior to a single unique visitor . This can lead to incomplete and fragmented data.

Lastly, data accuracy can be affected by sampling and variations across different analytics tools. Sampling helps process large amounts of data, but it might not provide the whole idea. And different tools may provide different levels of accuracy, so be mindful of that.

So, there you have it. Unique visitor tracking has its limitations. However, understanding these limitations will help you interpret the data wisely and complement it with other metrics and qualitative insights to get a complete picture of your audience and website performance.

As you can see, tracking unique website visitors provides crucial insights into your audience size, engagement, and the effectiveness of marketing efforts. It distinguishes the difference between visits, allowing you to understand your true reach and tailor personalized experiences. Used wisely, this data can inform decisions about strategy optimizing, boosting conversions, and even creating exceptional experiences for your visitors. So, embrace the power of tracking unique visitors and unlock the potential for growth and success.

What Is a Unique Visitor?

A unique visitor refers to an individual user who visits a website within a specific timeframe, regardless of the number of times they access the site. Each unique visitor is counted only once, providing a measure of the distinct individuals interacting with a website.

What Is the Difference Between Visitors and Unique Visitors?

Visitors represent the total number of visits to a website, including multiple visits from the same individual. Unique visitors, on the other hand, count only the individual users who visit the site, disregarding repeat visits within the specified timeframe.

What Is an Example of a Unique Visitor?

Let’s say a person visits an online store multiple times in a week. In this case, they would be counted as multiple visitors but only one unique visitor. Unique visitors focus on the number of distinct individuals rather than the overall number of visits.

Why Are Unique Visitors Important?

Unique visitors are crucial because they provide insights into the actual size of the audience engaging with a website. Measuring unique visitors helps businesses understand the reach and popularity of their site, track marketing effectiveness, personalize user experiences, and improve conversion rates. It enables businesses to make data-driven decisions for growth and success.

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Unique Visitors in Google Analytics: All You Need To Know

Google Analytics 4 measures website visitors differently than Universal Analytics.

The new event-based data model changes the way in which Google Analytics shows returning and new users on the main tool’s interface.

This changes the definition of unique visitors in Google Analytics 4 , but don’t worry - we’ll show you everything you need to know about unique users visiting your site right in this guide.

What Are Unique Visitors?

Unique visitors are defined as the number of unduplicated individual users who visit your website over the course of a specified time period.

Google Analytics unique visitors are one of the most important web analytics metrics and shows you insights regarding the growth and evolution of your site’s audience.

An increase in the total number of unique visitors means that your site is being accessed by new people over a certain time period.

This information can be used to determine the engagement of your site content, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and user behaviour based on traffic sources.

Official Google Analytics Definition of Unique Visitors

Google defines unique visitors as the “total number of unique users who logged an event.”

Back in Universal Analytics (compare UA to GA4 metrics here), the “Total Number of Users” metric was measured as a whole based on unique sessions (users that had at least one session within the selected date range).

In GA4, user visits can only be considered “unique” if:

  • A first-party cookie is stored on the user’s browser.
  • They trigger an engaged session event (stay on a web page for 10 seconds or more, visit another page, or trigger a conversion event).

How Does Google Analytics Identify Unique Visitors?

Google Analytics 4 determines unique visits by storing browser cookies when they open a session on your website.

GA4 cookies store a client ID in a first-party cookie called _ga. This cookie assigns an identifier to the new session, which helps the tool distinguish between a new user and a returning visitor.

Although the default expiration time of the ga cookie is 2 years , it is possible for web owners to change these parameters in order to comply with privacy regulations imposed by government authorities.

It is worth noting that some browsers, such as Safari, enforce limitations on the lifespan of cookies if users do not return to a certain website.

Unique Visitors vs New Users

Google Analytics 4 allows you to track unique visitors to your website through cookies, but what if one user comes back? Will they be tracked as a unique visitor?

No, as long as the first-party cookie with its unique identifier is still stored on their browser.

New users in Google Analytics 4 are the total number of users who launch or open your website for the first time. In order to classify website visitors as unique users, GA4 takes the following factors into account:

  • The user need to have a new unique user ID stored through cookies.
  • A first_visit or first_open event needs to be triggered.

Both conditions must be met in order to count users as new visitors.

If, for instance, a user triggers a first_open event, but their user ID has been already stored by GA4 in the past, they will be counted as a returning user.

Limitations of Unique Visitors Data in GA

Google’s way of measuring unique visitors is not perfect. Returning users can be counted as unique visitors sometimes, which causes inaccurate data reporting.

In the following scenarios, Google Analytics 4 will encounter anomalies while trying to measure unique visitors:

  • Cross-device cookie tracking: if the same user accesses your website through multiple devices or a different operating system, it will be counted as a new unique visitor.
  • Multiple individuals using the same device: if more than one person uses a single device to see your website, they will count as a single person towards the Unique Visitors web metric.
  • Incognito browsing modes contribute to inaccuracies: Incognito Browsing Modes, such as Google Chrome Incognito Mode , causes users to be seen as new users, even if they are returning visitors.
  • Local laws/regulations that make data collection limited: privacy regulations in some countries establish that websites can only store cookies if users give their consent. Google Analytics 4 has a cookie Consent Mode , which provides users with the option to get their user sessions tracked by cookies or not.

Where to Find Unique Visitors in Google Analytics 4

You can see how many unique visitors your site gets simply by logging into your Google Analytics account.

After you log in to Google Analytics account, go to the main Home Tab. There, you will see a graphic that shows you both Users and New Users.

“Users” refers to each unique visitor your website has obtained during the past few days.

Remember that you can change the date range of the graphic to get monthly, weekly or daily insights into the Unique Visitor metric.

If you have recently made the switch from UA to GA4, remember that the tools do not track unique visitors equally, even if the term “Users” appear the same.

GA4 tracks unique visitors based on events, whereas UA tracks unique visitors based on sessions.

This is all you need know about unique visitors concepts and definitions in Google Analytics 4. Keep in mind that unique visitor metrics should be analyzed, interpreted and checked based on your own website’s audience and goals.

Are Unique Visitors Same as Unique Pageviews?

No, unique visitors and unique pageviews are not the same. Unique pageviews are the number of times that certain web pages have been viewed by a unique visitor over a certain time period. This means that if a unique visitor sees 3 different pages, Google Analytics 4 will count it as 3 page views, but only a single Unique Page View.

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Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

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Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

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Jump to section:

Who Is A Unique Visitor? How Web Analytics Software Determines the Number of Unique Users The Software Collects Cookies The Software Analyzes the Cookie Cookies Get In the Server The User Count Starts How reliable is the process? How to Understand the Unique Website Visitors Use Click Mapping Software Use Co-Browsing Use Session-Recording Tools Why Understanding Unique Website Visitors Helps SEO Campaigns Unique Visitor Metric Shows If SEO Is Working Understanding Unique Users Exposes User Expectations Understanding Unique Users Exposes Website Errors Unique Website Visitors Help in A/B Testing Other Metrics That Give meaning to the Number of Unique Website Visitors Bounce Rate Average Visits Value per Visit Total Page Views The Case for Unique Visitors FAQ’s

The success of any business, including online ventures, depends on the number of customers flocking to it. Thus, it is imperative that you fully understand who your website’s unique visitors are. You can then use that as a starting point to improve SEO.

As a statistic, unique site visitors give vital insights on a website’s value and marketing strategies to improve its traffic. For example, you can modify your site’s content to suit your audience. If you can check out the visitor’s age through a tool such as Google Analytics , you can better design the interface and select products to present on your site.

Given the importance of the website traffic unique visitors relationship, it is only fair that you fully understand it. Armed with adequate knowledge, you stand to increase the value of a website to your audience. Sounds good to you? Well, then. Here is everything you need to know about website unique visitors statistics.

Who Is A Unique Visitor?

A unique visitor is a distinct person who visits your website in a given period. Google defines a unique visitor as the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. Usually, web traffic analysis tools give the number of visitors on a daily, weekly, and annual basis.

As much as the unique website visitor’s metric is important, it is not very useful on its own. You need to check on other statistics, such as the number of sessions per user. Additionally, related percentages such as bounce rates give more meaning to the number of unique visits.

Why is this so? The reasons lie in the methodology that web analytics use to determine what a unique visitors metric is. Since they use cookies, inherent problems associated with the cookie use feature in unique visits numbers. If a user uses different computers to view a site, every PC counts a different user. Thus, other metrics come in to help a website’s unique visits make more sense.

How Web Analytics Software Determines the Number of Unique Users

If you want to know the number of unique website visitors, all you have to do is use web analytics software. Besides checking the user counter, you can review data such as links clicked by visitors and what URLs sent them to your site.

However, it is important to know how the analytics software maintains the unique site visitor’s counter. After understanding the process, you will familiarize yourself with the drawbacks of the process. Afterward, you can decide the reliability score to place on the metrics.

Most web analytics software counts unique users using the following steps. Note that the methodology discussed skew towards Google Analytics, a prominent traffic analyzer.

The Software Collects Cookies

The first step of counting unique users is getting cookies from their browser. Whenever a browser navigates to a website for the first time, the web analytics software sets a cookie. Typically, the cookie is a string of numbers separated by periods. It looks something like:

GA1.2.887516345.1601837610

You can check the cookie associated with certain websites in your browser’s settings. So what does the string mean?

The first part, GA1, shows the version of the cookie. The second one indicates the components of a domain separated by the periods. As you can see, there are two numbers that the period alienates after the second field: 887516345.1601837610. The digit two preceding them shows that they are only two items after it.

The third and fourth fields represent the domain components. A regular top-level domain has two parts. For example, Google’s website is google.com.

The number 887516345 would represent “google” while digits 1601837610 would denote “com.” Of course, subdomain GA cookies have more fields. A cookie for a sub-domain like support.google.com would have a prefix GA1.3. A new string of numbers would come in to represent “support.” By default, the analytics software sets cookies on top-level domains.

The Software Analyzes the Cookie

The web analytics software perceives the GA cookie in a different way compared to browsers. Remember the fields mentioned a little earlier? The software takes an interest in the third and fourth fields. It labels them “random unique ID” and “first time stamp” respectively.

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The GA server takes the third and fourth fields and maintains them in a database. It is quite easy to extract them from your browser using small snippets of JavaScript code. The web analytics software combines the third and fourth fields and labels the fields “Client ID.” This value goes to the GA server.

Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

( Code for tracking cookie, metrictheory.com)

The User Count Starts

So how does the software answer the question, “what is a unique visitor”?

Every time a person navigates to a website, the web analytics software checks the first time stamp. If it detects a new client ID, it labels that as a unique visitor. Should it identify an existing ID, that counts as a returning user. It keeps a counter and shows the totals to you in its interface.

How reliable is the process?

The approach used by web analytics software is quite dependable. For example, if a returning visitor creates a new session, the software will check the timestamp and know that they are returning users. However, it has some drawbacks, such as:

  • The GA cookie lives only if the user does not delete it. With increased online privacy concerns, it is normal for visitors to clear cookies after a session. Removing them deletes the GA cookie, such that if they visit again, the web analytics software creates a new client ID and counts them as a new unique visitor .
  • There exists a chance that a single visitor has more than one computer. Should they use separate PCs to navigate the same site, the software counts them as two unique web visitors. The same applies when one uses different browsers or browses in both normal and incognito mode.
  • Different users may use the same computer to browse. The web analytics software will assume there is a single unique visitor, while there can be many.

These downsides lower the value provided by the unique user metric. You can add the lost importance back to understanding your audience using some simple techniques.

Did you know? Google analytics allows you to view not only unique visitors, but also which device they are using, and which keyword they used in the search engine to find you.

How to Understand the Unique Website Visitors

The simplest way to gather insights on your monthly unique visitor’s website statistics is to study user behavior. Here are a few ways to do that.

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Use click mapping software.

Among the easiest ways to get into a unique user’s head is by checking on what they clicked. Regular web analytics shows you the links clicked, but a click mapping software displays everything a user clicked, including non-linked items. How is this helpful?

For starters, it allows you to know what items the unique visitor thought were a link. If you find that visitors clicked on non-linked images, they may have thought it would redirect to a product page or enlarge. Thus, it would be a good idea to modify the image to do just that.

Click mapping software also helps you know if visitors scrolled to the footer. That way, you can understand how interesting the visitors found your site. While at it, you can check which part of the website received the most clicks. You can then place more interesting content there or even add a call-to-action button.

Use Co-Browsing

If your small business can afford it, you can start using co-browsing. You would need an active customer support team to implement this technique. Customers will be sharing their screens with you, and you need a person present to guide them. This technique’s major advantage is that it helps you to understand what areas of your website that visitors have trouble using. You can then improve it through a redesign. Moreover, you get to see errors experienced by users in real-time, making the corrections very easy.

If you lack the resources to understand your audience in this manner, you can set up a live chat. Numerous plugins can help implement live chat systems. Afterward, you can analyze queries from visitors to understand where their interest lies.

Use Session-Recording Tools

As the word suggests, session recording tools keep a record of your visitor’s screen while they were on your site. You get to see mouse movements, scrolls, and keystrokes.

This technique allows you to understand how visitors are using your website. You will know the first link they clicked and what the exit page is. Additionally, you can explore the errors that pop up during a session and use that to improve your site.

Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

(Session Recording Interface, mopinion.com)

Why Understanding Unique Website Visitors Helps SEO Campaigns

If you are thinking of ways to get unique visitors, the secret lies in understanding the ones you already have . Based on the techniques above, you can guess why knowing your online audience inside out and backward is so essential. Deeper knowledge about website unique visitors helps SEO campaigns because:

Unique Visitor Metric Shows If SEO Is Working

Do you have an SEO campaign to aid your digital marketing strategy? The best way to know if it is effective is checking the number of new users. If it spikes, keep doing what you are doing.

Stagnant or plummeting numbers mean that your campaign may not be as effective as it needs to be. Using insights such as data on exit pages, you know what part of the website turns your visitors off. Appropriate actions to improve SEO can then follow.

Understanding Unique Users Exposes User Expectations

Using one of the techniques discussed to know more about your visitors, you put yourself in the shoes of your website users. Such deep knowledge about your audience allows you to understand what customers need for your website to function.

The insights gathered influence which SEO strategies to put in action. For example, if you realize that users are having trouble finding content on your site, you can start using internal links.

Understanding Unique Users Exposes Website Errors

The techniques used to shed light on a unique visitor’s behavior show if users encountered errors when using your site. Neither web visitors nor owners want errors on their site. Remember, mistakes on the site can hamper SEO efforts. Thus, doing away with them may boost your website’s traffic.

Unique Website Visitors Help in A/B Testing

What if you have three of four landing pages, and you want to know which is the best one? The solution is directing different unique users to separate pages. The one with the highest performance is ultimately chosen. This method aids your SEO efforts as it tells you the page to focus them on.

Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

(Example of an A/B test. Testing two forms side-by-side in order to determine which performs best, wordstream.com)

Did you know? Google analytics is the most popular program on the internet.

Other Metrics That Give meaning to the Number of Unique Website Visitors

Combining your metrics with some data provided by web analytics software can help add value to it. The other metrics you should check out are:

Bounce Rate

If a unique visitor navigates to your site, clicks on nothing, and leaves, that is a bounce. It translates to the inability of your website to interest the user. A high number of unique website visitors and high bounce rate shows that SEO might be working, but your site is not providing the necessary value. You can increase page loading speeds as well as relevant content.

Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

( Bounce rate in Google Analytics, mangools.com)

Average Visits

If you are keen on finding out how many times a unique user came back to your site, this is the metric to check out. It is important because it shows the interest your website garnered with the new user. If the number is slow, try providing new content.

Value per Visit

If your website makes any money, you can divide it by the number of unique users and estimate how much each visit brings. This metric helps you understand how much to spend on SEO to bring in more new visitors.

Total Page Views

This informs you of the number of times visitors loaded a specific page. It is essential since it enables you to find out how loyal your visitors are. It also discloses what pages the audience care about the most.

There are more statistics to check out to enlighten you on whether a unique visit benefits your business. You can utilize the newfound data to know the value of a new visitor. On the same note, you can better estimate the budgets to allocate for SEO strategies aimed at increasing unique users.

After enough research, you can explore ways to increase the number of unique visits to a website. There exist two major ways to grow new traffic to a site. The first is non-paid and captures methods such as SEO. The other is online adverts.

The approach you use to get unique visitors in droves depends on your business’s nature and needs. An ideal digital marketing strategy combines both paid and organic sources of traffic. However, you may need a specialist to help you figure out the right proportion for advertisements and SEO.

Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

(Different metrics present in Google Analytics, reliablesoft.net)

We hope that you found this article useful.

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The Case for Unique Visitors

The lifeline of any online business lies in its ability to attract unique users. After understanding where new users come from, components that interest them on your site, what turns them off, and how they expect your website to be, you can target them better. Ultimately, businesses that figure out the website traffic unique visitors connection stand out.

However, many additional metrics come into play when deciding what statistics like monthly unique visitors mean for your website. You might need professional SEO help when interpreting and adding value to the raw data. Regardless of how you decide to use the unique user metrics, it remains one of the few tools that can increase profitability when utilized the right way.

Diib®: Your Small Business SEO Service Experts!

Search engine optimization is a long-term marketing strategy. You should, therefore, not expect instant results as it will take the search engine time to index your new pages. It will take about three months before seeing tangible results from your SEO strategy. But most importantly, consider working with the best SEO services for small business providers. 

Diib Digital is one of these SEO service providers. Our User Dashboard gives you minute-by-minute updates and statistics which then allow you to tweak your campaign for ideal results. Here are some of the features our small business partner report loving:

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FAQ’s

Why are unique visitors important.

Unique visitors give site owner an idea of their site’s reach, and how it relates to their users. Furthermore, it gives potential advertisers the ability to see how the site performs.

What is the bounce rate?

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that exit the site quickly, without viewing some of the content on the page.

How do you find unique visitors on your site?

You can find your unique visitors and other statistics through Google Analytics.

What are a goof amount of unique visitors monthly?

A good amount of unique visitors monthly would be around 1,000 visitors monthly.

What is a good bounce rate?

How can diib® help me improve my website today (expand over by the down arrow).

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With so many members we are also able to provide wholesale pricing combined with very high-quality work on services such as:

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Daniel Urmann

Daniel Urmann is the co-founder of Diib.com. Over the past 17 years Daniel has helped thousands of business grow online through SEO, social media, and paid advertising. Today, Diib helps over 150,000 business globally grow online with their SaaS offerings. Daniel’s interest include SMB analytics, big data, predictive analytics, enterprise and SMB search engine optimization (SEO), CRO optimization, social media advertising, A/B testing, programatic and geo-targeting, PPC, and e-commerce. He holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) focused in Finance and E-commerce from Cornell University – S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management.

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What Are Unique Visitors and Why Do They Matter?

unique page visits

Do unique visitors really matter and can they make a difference? What does this statistic mean for marketers and why is it so important? 

In today’s article, we’re answering these questions and more and also looking at what value your website unique visitors can have for you from a marketing and money-making perspective. 

Table of Contents

Unique Visits Definition

If you have used Google Analytics before or any other type of software for tracking your views and unique visitors, you probably know that there is a difference between views and unique visits. 

A unique visitor is a person that goes to your website and accesses it for the first time and for a variable period. This statistic can be measured in a number of ways – you can look at your daily visitors, those that you acquire for the whole week and last, but definitely not least, the number of unique visitors you have per month. 

What detail worth noting is that unique visitors are not the only type of metric that can determine the value of your website. It is more of a combination between this figure and your bounce rate, visit duration, as well as the number of total page views you can get in a month. 

unique page visits

Why do unique visits matter?

Unique visitors are a quite important metric for several reasons. Whether you are looking to monetize your website yourself either by using affiliate marketing or some other monetization options, it goes without saying that you need as many unique visitors as possible.

Repeat visitors and customers are obviously also important, but they might not matter as much in the long run. For example, when you have to present a pitch to a company, it’s quite likely that they are going to look at your unique visits number more than they would on their repeating visitors. 

Another area where this metric can prove its value is in establishing the credibility of your brand. Best of all, it is a clear indicator of growth. When you publish content on a regular basis and you’re getting indexed for the keywords you target, it’s quite natural for people to find out using search engines.

This tells other brands that might want to work with you that your website is valuable and that your brand is continuing its growth. Needless to say, these companies have a budget for marketing so they will want to spend their money only on collaborations that provide them with some return on investment. 

Website unique visitor measurement

You can use any tool that’s convenient for you to measure your unique visits, but we have found that Google Analytics is by far the most effective one and the one that also gives you accurate data. 

You might try others, and we aren’t going to say anything against SEMRush or Ahrefs, but their data might not be up to date all of the time. The way the calculation is made is strictly based on the user’s IP. 

There are multiple ways of ‘cheating’ the system into thinking that you’re actually getting more unique visitors than you actually are, but since most people look at other metrics besides your unique visits, you have to pay attention to a number of factors — and we will detail all of them in a section below. 

unique page visits

What other key metrics are related to unique visitors?

While this metric is very important, in fact, we might argue that it is the most important, it needs to be correlated with others. For instance, if you try to use shady techniques of increasing your number of unique visits per month just to get sponsorships, you might not be able to achieve the same with other metrics. 

Here are some that brands that might want to work with you are going to analyze:

Visit duration

Bounce rate, total page views.

  • Average visits per week or month
  • Interactions per visit

Ideally, someone who visits your website for the first time is going to find information that is useful enough to convince them that they might want to have a look around. 

That means that they will both spend some time on the page or post they’ve come across and read it thoroughly (which, by the way, not too many people do these days), but they might also want to see what other articles you’ve written and published in the past. 

A higher duration of a user’s visit to your website is important not just for the brands you might want to work with in the future, but also for the way you are ranked in the search engines. 

Your bounce rate can be essential when it comes to getting that position in the 1-3s on the first page of a search query. When visitors click on a result they see in Google or Bing, for example, they need to find specifically what they are looking for. 

Otherwise, they are going to click the back button on their browsers, and then select a different result on the search page. This will effectively tell the search engine that what they found on your website wasn’t good enough. 

Sometimes, it takes just one second or less for people to make up their minds on whether they want to read an article and if it is relevant to them or not. The click-through-rate is extremely important for search engines. 

If a user leaves your site almost as quickly as it accesses it, this will influence your rankings in the long run — and in a negative way. 

There is a trick that some websites have been using for a while now and it’s the introduction of a ‘read more’ button after the first paragraph of their content. 

That means that the text people stumble upon needs to be extremely enticing so that they click on the button and at least spend more time on your website — therefore telling the search engines that people are engaging with your content more. 

The number of total views is in fact the number of page loads you have on your website — whether that’s a new visitor or someone coming back. 

It is a pretty good indicator when it comes to assessing how loyal your readership is. Do they come back for more or do they just leave your site after a couple of seconds upon not finding what they are truly looking for?  

Average visits

This is another metric that can be used to tell what loyalty your readership has for your website. 

It’s a somewhat confusing metric, one that not a lot of brands look at as it is a combination between page views and unique visitors, which can make it somewhat irrelevant for marketing campaigns and establishing the value of putting an ad on a website. 

Number of interactions per each visit

When a person finds you using a search query and clicks on a page or post on your website, that is what you would call an ‘interaction 1’. 

But the whole point is that while this unique visitor matters since it all adds up, they should both spend a bit more time on your website (hopefully more than a minute) and after finding the information they need, they should go through your other articles.

The reason we have mentioned this metric in relation to the website unique visitor one is that it can matter in the grand scheme of things. For example, just one visitor that checks out your website twice or three times per week and looks at three pages each will increase both your number of interactions, but also the number of total page views. 

unique page visits

How exactly are unique visitors useful for you?

We have already described how this metric is one that’s essential for collaborating with brands, but there are some other ways your number of unique visitors can prove its worth to you. 

For example and in relation to what we have mentioned before, it is a good way of deciding on a price. Sure, there are a lot of ways you might be able to tell what you can ask for an advertising campaign, an advertorial, or the placement of a banner on your website. 

Moreover, these days you might be able to combine a variety of other marketing methods, so you could, for instance, offer packages where you mention the brand or its products on your Instagram stories or in a post, on your YouTube channel, and also write an article about trying out the services. Many influencers offer such packages these days and depending on their number of followers, they can ask for higher prices. 

The number of unique visitors is also a metric that can be used by you when you purchase guest posts, for example. While it most definitely is not the only one you should look at (the DR, site age, and other factors matter, too), it can definitely influence the way you negotiate with the website owner or journalist you reach out to. 

The lower the number of unique visitors, the lower the price of a backlink from that website. You should also look at the page views, of course, and perhaps ask around and see if that blogger isn’t offering links for lower prices on platforms such as People per Hour or Fiverr , too. 

It’s also worth noting that you can use your unique visitors to compare your data across a period of time. If you’re just starting out, your number of unique visits is probably pretty low, but it might be a good idea to create a report over a period of six or even twelve months and look what progress you have made and perhaps think of ways your growth has been slowed down. 

Finally, unique visitors can be quite useful for A/B testing. Although it might sound a bit complicated, A/B testing can be extremely valuable, especially for people producing digital products or offering digital services or those that create several different landing pages. 

The reports will be a tad challenging to create, though, in that you’ll have to make sure that you have an accurate sample size and also carefully analyze the performance of your A/B testing campaign. 

unique page visits

Competition analysis and unique visitors

It can be frustrating, particularly for someone who’s just starting out their affiliate marketing journey or who’s just built their first website to see that their competitors have a number of unique visitors that can’t be matched no matter the amount of effort you might put into marketing.

But the truth is that huge websites, especially those that have been around for a while and have found a so-called ‘recipe for success’ also use paid ads to increase their unique visitor figures and also acquire more customers or generate more sales using some other method. 

For this reason, you have to look at what your competitors are doing in terms of the marketing channels they are using and how they’re generating unique visits, but you also have to consider the paid ads. 

If you’ve got no budget for paid ads, you need to use your creativity and a number of growth marketing techniques, instead. Replicating their social media marketing campaign might be worth a try, but you also have to look at everything else they are doing, from the number of backlinks they are acquiring, from which sites, what guest posts they’ve published on other websites in the past, if they’ve done any PR and everything else. Even the anchor text of the backlinks matters. 

The information that you acquire during all of this process can help you understand what marketing strategy you should use and how you should tweak it. 

On top of that, you should know that some websites simply must use paid ads — otherwise they really stand no chance against competitors. 

A good example in this case would have to be eCommerce websites, which can make a lot of sales through Facebook ads, for instance, but they have to work with a pretty good social media manager to get the results they need. 

unique page visits

While your unique visitors are undoubtedly important, this is a metric that needs to be associated with others, such as the total page views, interactions, or bounce rate you have on your website.

Also, depending on the exact type of content you have on your website, you might acquire more users seasonally (on holidays or for specific discount periods such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday). 

School schedules, severe weather, promotions, as well as news and events can all influence your unique visitors, so the metric can vary a lot depending on your niche and what topics you tackle on your website. 

Need help with your SEO or digital marketing efforts? We have lots of plans and courses available. Get in touch to find out how we can be of assistance!

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How to view unique visitors in Google Analytics

Is anybody out there? When you pour your creativity and hard work into your website, service, or marketing campaigns, it’s nice to know if people pay attention. Tracking unique visitors in Google Analytics is one way to confirm real people see and appreciate your efforts.

But knowing how many people visit your website does more than soothe your concerns about whether you’re reaching users—it also helps you communicate your impact to stakeholders and make customer-driven decisions.

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unique page visits

This guide teaches you what the unique visitors metric in Google Analytics is, how to measure it, and when to use the metric. 

What is the unique visitors metric in Google Analytics?

Unique visitors (or unique users) in Google Analytics is a count of unduplicated individuals who visit your site in a specific time frame.

For example, if Nicole visits your site three times, Tawni visits two times, and Stephanie visits four times, Google Analytics counts that as three unique visitors—even though there were nine separate sessions. 

As a refresher, a session in Google Analytics is a collection of someone’s interaction with your websites, AKA their visit to your site or app.

How to find unique visitors in Google Analytics

If you use Universal Analytics (UA),  ‘users’ always refers to unique visitors.  Any report listing 'users', like the Audience or Acquisition categories, counts unduplicated visitors.

However, this guide focuses on Google Analytics 4 (GA4) since Google transitions to that version in July 2023, and 'unique visitors' isn't the default in GA4. Instead:

'Total users' = unique visitors or unique users ✅

'Users' = active users (NOT unique visitors) ❌

‘Users’ often appear on GA4 reports, but it’s not a direct match for a unique user count. Here are two spots that do list unique visitors in Google Analytics 4. 

Engagement events report

The first place to view unique users in GA4 is through the 'Life cycle' Events report:

Open ‘Reports’

Click on ‘Engagement’ under the ‘Life cycle’ section

Select ‘Events’ from the drop-down menu

Read the ‘Total users’ column

The GA4 events report counts ‘total users,’ which they define as ‘the total number of unique users who log an event.’ Image via Google Analytics . 

Engagement conversions report

The second option to view unique users in GA4 is through the 'Life cycle' Conversions report: 

Select ‘Conversions’ from the drop-down menu

GA4 tracks unique users for events, not page visits. Image via Google Analytics

When to use unique visitors in Google Analytics

Unique visitors shows you how many individual users you reach, regardless of whether they visit your website once or ten times.

Without taking your unique visitors into account, you’d have a skewed perception of how many customers completed an event, like viewing a product page—imagine if Nicole’s three sessions, Tawni’s two sessions, and Stephanie’s four sessions counted as nine users instead of the actual three.

Here are three scenarios where you’d use unique visitors in Google Analytics as a starting point to understand user behavior . 

1. Measure your website’s reach

Imagine a product marketer has custom events in GA4 to measure blog visits and lead magnet landing pages. At the end of the year, they include total users (AKA the number of unique visitors) in a report for stakeholders to compare their performance against goals. 

They also include the ‘event count per user’ to measure how many times unique users view content on average.

❗️ But Google Analytics can’t reveal why users return or decide to stop visiting to help the product marketer decrease bounce rate. 

2. Compare website traffic before and after updates

Suppose a product designer needs to gauge if a navigation redesign makes it easier for users to find a particular page on their app, so they compare monthly total users for that event from before and after the update. 

The unique users count in GA4 reveals whether they met, exceeded, or failed at their engagement goal.

❗️ But Google Analytics doesn’t show how users interact with the redesign. 

3. Determine how far users get down the sales funnel

Let’s say a product manager wants to understand how far most website visitors make it in the ecommerce checkout flow , so they compare total users for various conversion events, like viewing an item, beginning checkout, and adding payment information. 

GA4 will show them a steep decline in users between beginning checkout and finalizing a purchase.

❗️ But Google Analytics won't show them the reason for the decline.

🚨 Keep in mind: total users in GA4 indicate user volume but not behavior. And if you want to make informed decisions about what to keep, change, or get rid of to create a better customer experience, you need to combine qualitative and quantitative data. 

For example, if you saw that more people added item A to their cart than item B, you might assume item B lacks product-market fit . But that quantitative data alone won’t tell you that the buttons on item B’s web page are broken or that you’re promoting item B to the wrong user persona .

Combining website analytics with digital experience insights reveals how users behave and why.

How to pair unique visitors with digital experience insights

Digital experience insights let you observe and learn from users with tools like recordings, heatmaps, surveys, and interviews to build on your Google Analytics discoveries.

Simply adding an exit-intent survey to the item A vs. item B scenario above would reveal that customers want item B in a different color or that crucial details are missing from the product description. 

Let’s revisit the scenarios from the previous section to understand how digital experience insights help teams dig deeper into user behavior patterns . 

Hear about customer preferences directly from them

Think back to the marketing team measuring the reach of their blog and how often unique users came back for more. To make their future content customer-centric, they use a tool like Hotjar to:

Interview customers about what stood out to them, their likes and dislikes, goals, and what they want to learn

Concept test blog image styles to learn which designs drive engagement, so they can carry out optimizations

#Hotjar concept testing surveys take only a moment of your customers’ time, but the results help you continuously improve

See how customers move through your website

The product designer from earlier uses unique visitors in GA4 to measure how well a redesign drives traffic to a particular step in the customer journey . 

The next step in their investigation is to watch recordings to see exactly how users scroll, move, u-turn, and rage click on the page. 

When the designer realizes the culprit is a banner that users thought they could click, they rework the page and see engagement increase.

Understand why customers convert (or leave)

Finally, recall the product manager who views total users at each milestone to analyze the sales funnel. 

GA4 revealed a steep decline in users between beginning checkout and finalizing a purchase, so they analyze scroll heatmaps to see how far down each page customers usually scroll. 

To narrow their focus even more, the product manager uses Hotjar Funnels to view sessions of low-engagement pages and uncover a bug that caused the drop-offs, improving the user experience (UX).

#Hotjar Funnels reveal engagement at each step of your sales funnel so you can quickly zoom in on problem areas

Have a plan before you dive into Google Analytics reports

Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool, but the different terms and charts become overwhelming if you wander too deep without a plan. 

First, choose a question to answer, like, “How many people interacted with our blog this year?” or “Are there points in the sales funnel where customers drop off?” Then, use the unique visitors (total users) metric in GA4 to gauge user volume for the event. 

Since GA’s quantitative data only gets you so far, you need to use a digital experience insights platform like Hotjar to make sense of your data and learn how your audience interacts with your website or app. 

The more you know about the what, why, when, and how of customer experience, the quicker you’ll delight customers , increase engagement, and boost conversion rates.

Understand what unique visitors do on your website

Unique visitors in GA4 tell you how many people visited your site or app, but you need Hotjar’s tools to understand what they did and why.

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[UA] The difference between Google Ads Clicks, and Sessions, Users, Entrances, Pageviews, and Unique Pageviews in Analytics

Data in your Analytics account can be easy to misinterpret due to the many similar terms used in different reports. This article explains the terms that most often lead to questions.

Clicks vs. Sessions

Clicks vs. users, sessions vs. users, sessions vs. entrances, pageviews vs. unique pageviews.

There is an important distinction between clicks (such as in your Google Ads  reports) and sessions (such as in your Audience reports). The Clicks column in your reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by users, while Sessions indicates the number of unique sessions initiated by your users. There are several reasons why these two numbers may not match: A user may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, Google Ads records multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes the separate pageviews as one session. This is a common behavior among users engaging in comparison shopping. A user may click on an ad, and then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral information from the original session is retained in this case, so the one click results in multiple sessions. A user may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing the browser's Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers. However, Google Ads still registers a click. To ensure more accurate billing, Google Ads automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports. However, Analytics reports these clicks as sessions on your website in order to show the complete set of traffic data. Learn more about the differences between clicks and sessions .
There is an important distinction between clicks (such as in your Google Ads  reports) and users (such as in your Audience reports). The Clicks column in your Google Ads reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by users, while Users indicates the number of unique (deduplicated) users who clicked your ads. There are several reasons why these two numbers may not match: A user may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, Google Ads records multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes a single user. This is a common behavior among users engaging in comparison shopping. A user may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing the browser's Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers, and no user is counted in this case. However, Google Ads still registers a click. To ensure more accurate billing, Google Ads automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports. However, Analytics reports all users who clicked ads in order to show the complete set of traffic data.
Analytics measures both sessions and users in your account. Sessions represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the users 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 session and an additional user . Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional sessions , but not as additional users .
Sessions are incremented with the first hit of a session, whereas entrances are incremented with the first pageview hit of a session. If the first hit of the session is not a pageview, you may see a difference between the number of session and the number of entrances .
A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user 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.

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What are Google Analytics Page Views? (Complete Guide)

Learn how to find and interpret page views in Google Analytics reports. Easy guide for beginners.

Alex Chris

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What are pageviews in Google Analytics?

How to combine pageviews with other metrics for more actionable reports, key learnings.

Two widely used metrics in Google analytics are pageviews and unique page views . Both are used by digital marketers to measure the performance of a website or webpage over a given period of time.

A lot of people either intentionally or un-intentionally, confuse pageviews with the number of users a website has.

Pageviews is not the same as the number of unique users that visited a website. As you’ll see below, pageviews is the total number of loads and reloads of the same page, from the same user within in a single user session.

This means it is wrong to present the pageviews metric as the total number of visits a website received for a given period of time.

The pageviews value will always be higher than the number of unique site visitors.

In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Google analytics page views, including:

  • What are pageviews?

What counts as a page view?

  • What are unique page views in Google Analytics?

The pageviews metric in Google Analytics shows the total number of pages viewed for a given period of time. A pageview is a view of a page that is being tracked by Google Analytics. A view can be the initial load of a page, a reload or a revisit to the page.

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This is the official definition given by Google Analytics:

Google Analytics Pageview Definition

When a web page is loaded (or reloaded) in a browser, this counts as a single pageview.

Here is an example to understand how a pageview and pageviews are counted.

  • John visits Page A.
  • While on Page A, he reloads the page (clicks the refresh button).
  • From Page A he clicks a link to go to Page B.
  • From Page B he clicks a link and goes back to Page A.

In the above scenario, Google Analytics will show 3 Page Views for Page A and 4 Page Views for John’s session.

What are unique Page Views?

‘Unique page views’ shows the number of sessions a specific page was viewed at least once.

In the above scenario, the total number of unique page views for page A is 1.

In simple terms, the unique page views metric shows how many unique users visited a particular page, while the page views metric shows the total number of times a page was viewed (can include multiple views from the same user session)

How to see pageviews in Google Analytics

Let’s see how to look at pageviews in Google Analytics reports.

Go to the AUDIENCE > OVERVIEW report. You will see a table like the example below.

Audience Overview Report Showing Pageviews

Take a closer look at USERS, SESSION, PAGES / SESSION and PAGEVIEWS.

The 2009 users initiated 2114 sessions (visits to the site) and in each session they visited on average 1.35 pages, which resulted in 2863 pageviews.

So, in this example the actual number of unique visitors was 2009 and not 2863 (Pageviews). It’s wrong to say that this website got 2863 users.

How to see unique pageviews in Google Analytics

Go to the SITE CONTENT REPORT (found under BEHAVIOUR > SITE CONTENT > ALL PAGES). You will see these numbers:

Site Content Report - Google Analytics

Notice that the UNIQUE PAGE VIEWS is less than the PAGEVIEWS. This is because a single user may have visited a particular page more than once during a single session.

Pageviews is by itself an important metric, but when combined with other data, it can help you understand more about your website and visitor behavior.

Here are some examples:

Create a Segment to split your Pageviews between Desktop and Mobile.

While in the AUDIENCE > OVERVIEW report, click +ADD SEGMENTS and SELECT MOBILE TRAFFIC.

Pageviews from Mobile Traffic

This will show you how many pageviews you received from mobile compared to the total number of page views.

Pageviews from Mobile Traffic

How many users created more than 3-page views

You can also go one step further and create a custom segment and see what percentage of your users created 3 or more pageviews before leaving.

More than 3 Pageviews Custom Segment

If you are new to Google Analytics, read these 3 guides to get a better idea on how to use Google Analytics reports to improve your website.

  • How to use Google Analytics to Boost your SEO
  • Best Google Analytics Report for Beginners
  • What is bounce rate in Google Analytics

As a general rule of thumb, the greater number of pageviews a page receives, the better. But, that should not be confused with page popularity.

Users might be generating more views for a page if they re-load it during the same session by going back and forth.

For example, if you have a page with a list of links to other pages on your website, that page may have a lot more views than other pages because users might click to visit one of the internal links and then come back to the page to visit the next one etc.

A more accurate metric in this case is the unique pageviews. This will give you a better picture on how many UNIQUE users have visited the particular page.

If on the other hand, you want to measure how many pages (unique) users visit before leaving, you should concentrate on the PAGES/SESSION metric.

Alex Chris

Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn .

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June 28, 2019 at 12:19 pm

Very useful and informative post, Alex. Thanks for sharing.

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May 21, 2020 at 2:17 pm

You have explained pageviews with great example. Very informative

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July 12, 2020 at 8:31 pm

Great job Alex! I’m totally loving your full Digital marketing course. I bought the all-access version. Right now I’m in the middle of the SEO course and it’s so awesome. I’ve learned more from this course in a short period of time than any other article or how-to. Thank you for the resource! It’s worth the money and then some!

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Understanding Basic Visitor Metrics

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Learn about Page Views , Visits , and Visitors in Adobe Analytics.

Get definitions of these basic visit metrics and learn about their similarities and differences.

Learn the various terms (synonyms or keywords) associated with visitor metrics and Website traffic.

View a sample Workspace project that shows how these metrics are displayed in the interface.

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Hey everybody this is Doug in this video I want to talk about Basic Visitor’s Metrics or you can see here key Adobe Analytics Visitors Metrics. So there ar the really main 3 that you are going to look at when you are talking about most basic of analytics metrics so you’ve got visitor visit and page view and many time people start at the bottom with the page just being as you can seen here being counted for each server called that is sent or a page comes up and we count that as a page view. I’m going to get to the side note here in a second when you have multiple page views or you’ve come to a site and go do one or more pages that is considered as a visit so you can see here visit is a sequence of page views in a sitting. The visits metric is commonly used in reports that display the number of user sessions within the selected time period. Again just think of it as somebody coming to your site and going to one or more pages. Now the difference between a visit and what you might think of a session is that a session closes when you close the browser right you’re done. But a visit in analytics this is very standard in the industry a visit is over when there is a time out period reached. So for example 30 minutes. When there is a time period of 30 minutes for no more pages are viewed and therefore no more hits are sent to Adobe Analytics then that visit is closed. So technically if you open the browser you went to 4 pages and you closed it and you open it right away again and went to some other pages it would continue the same visit. So just again most of the time it’s a session but again the technical definition of a visit does include that timeout period as opposed to the closing of a browser for example. And of course the top one is the number of visitors of the number unique users that comes to your site for a certain time period. And of course a visitor might have one or more sessions or visits during a given time period and a visit they might go to of certain number of pages. So hopefully that allows you to see the relationship there between those. So some the other words you might hear about this is people are asking you question and you’re trying to find out answers for maybe your CEO or CMO or who ever wants to know about what’s going on your site. They might say ‘Hey how many people come to our page’ you know daily or whatever. So then’s that’s visitors. They might say users and in reality it is actually devices. So if a person comes to your page on one device and then come another one they are seen as 2 visitors. And they might ask for a visit or sessions or how many times people come to the site you going to have to sometimes translate a little bit of what people asking you for when you map that to the different metrics you have on your site. And of course the page use sometimes people talk about those as hits. An some other vendors will use some of those same terms and so you can see that here. Now let me go to analytics to the interface for just a second and will look at how this looks in the report.

So you can see here that I have some basic metrics in my report. And I have dragged over from the left hand side unique visitors, visits and page views. So you can see that I have those for any given time period in this case daily numbers for how many different people came to my site and of those people how many total visits so you can see that’s a little bit more so some people are coming one time on that day. And some people came twice who knows maybe some people came three times. And then on those visits how many total pages so you can see here that it’s about maybe on average two and half page views per visit the people are seeing on your site on June 1 here. So again that’s the relationship here between unique visitors visits and page views and if I scroll down and I’ve also added a table here about the different pages. So now we can start looking for different dimensions and will talk more about those in another video. But you can see here that for example for the home page at a given time period we have a time period setup as the current month, this is actually only a partial month and for the time period we can see there were 21,014 page views for the home page so the home page is brought up that many times. It was in this many visits and it was this many people that did it so then you can also assign those basic traffic metrics not only overall to your site but also to individual dimensions or pieces or a pages or kinds of users etc on your site.

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Unique visits explained

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At Simple Analytics we do things a bit differently. We put the privacy of your visitors first. At the same time we comply with strict (and necessary) privacy laws. This has an impact on our statistics, like unique visits. We record page views (which is very easy to do without invading the privacy of your visitors). With unique visits it’s easier to invade the privacy of your visitors. Traditional analytics tools will show you unique visits based on a cookie they place on the visitors computer. This can be extremely invasive to privacy because a visitor can be tracked for a longer period of time. Most privacy analytics tools use hashes from the IP address of visitors. Combined with a date this is a bit better for privacy. We do it even better.

No cookies or fingerprinting

We do not use cookies (or any kind of storage), fingerprinting, or PII data.

With the new ruling of the European court it’s forbidden to have pre-ticked cookie consent forms under GDPR. In the UK it’s already clear in PECR (the UK’s privacy directive). In these directives it’s also forbidden to fingerprint a visitor. Other analytics businesses use this technique (for example based on IP address). This seems privacy friendly but is considered fingerprinting. For which, you need consent.

No consent needed

With Simple Analytics you don’t need consent. It’s one of our core values.

We don’t want you to ask for consent ever. Our service is targeted at companies that want to get the big picture. Tracking customers is not part of that. That’s why we came up with our unique way of tracking unique visits.

When a visitor navigates from website to website the browser sends a referrer along. If you for example visit website randomwebsite.com and navigate to yourwebsite.com it sends the referrer randomwebsite.com to yourwebsite.com . This referrer is very useful to figure out where traffic is coming from. We use the referrer to calculate if a visit is unique.

unique page visits

When a user lands on your website without visiting another website (direct visit) we record it as a unique visit:

unique page visits

If you have a single-page application we automatically see all visits after the first visit as a non unique visit. For the first visit we use above functionality to detect if a visit is unique.

If you have any questions about legal aspects or anything else, please shoot us a message .

Follow Simple Analytics or the founder on Twitter to see how we approach our challenges.

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What Are Unique Site Visitors? Definition and How to Calculate Them

Table of contents, what are unique site visitors.

Unique site visitors are those individuals who visit a website at least once in a given timeframe and are counted separately from visits, which is the total number of times someone arrives at a website. Unique visitors are important in that they provide marketers with valuable insight into their audience and can be increased through SEO and other marketing tactics. In order to calculate unique visitors, marketers must measure the number of distinct individuals that access the website during a given reporting period.

Additionally, marketers should also use other metrics such as bounce rate and visit duration to gain a more expansive understanding of a website’s performance. By tracking and analyzing unique visitors, marketers can better understand the size of their website’s audience and evaluate visitor satisfaction.’

unique page visits

What are the Benefits of Measuring Unique Site Visitors?

1. they give an insight into how many people are visiting your website..

Measuring unique visitors can help to better understand the actual size of a website’s audience. By tracking the number of unique visits, it is possible to get a more accurate view of visitor satisfaction. Additionally, analyzing this data along with other key performance indicators (KPIs) can provide insight into the success of a content marketing campaign, the effectiveness of SEO, the impact of social media channels, and the engagement of the website audience. Furthermore, tracking unique visitors can help to identify areas for improvement, such as more effective keywords, more engaging content, and more targeted marketing strategies. By tracking unique visitors, it is possible to set goals and targets to further grow the website’s audience and increase conversions.

2. They indicate how successful your marketing campaigns are.

Measuring unique site visitors can help you evaluate the success of your marketing campaigns by allowing you to track and analyze how well your outreach and content efforts are paying off. By assessing the number of unique visitors a website receives, you can determine the cost per lead, as well as the value per visit. These metrics can then be used to compare and measure the profitability of a website, page, or marketing campaign. Additionally, the number of unique visitors can be used as a key performance indicator to measure the impact of a content marketing campaign, SEO, social media channels and keywords on a company’s overall growth. By measuring the number of unique visitors, you can better understand the reach of your website’s audience and create targeted goals for improvement and growth.

3. They help you to understand the behavior of your website visitors.

By measuring unique site visitors, you can gain an insight into the behavior of your website visitors. By understanding how many people are visiting your site for the first time, you can get an understanding of your audience and how your marketing campaigns are performing. This information can be used to adjust your campaigns to target new audiences and generate more leads, as well as improve your SEO strategy. Additionally, this data can help you to understand your customers’ behavior, such as whether they are returning to your website or not, and can help you to identify any issues that you need to address.

4. They show how engaged your audience is with your content.

Measuring unique site visitors can help to show how engaged your audience is with your content by tracking and analyzing interactions per visit. This includes anything from clicking on an interactive button or commenting on a post to viewing a video. By knowing how many visitors are actively interacting with your website, you can get an idea of how successful your content is at engaging users and driving interest in your brand. Additionally, tracking visit duration can help you to determine how long visitors are spending on your website and if they are finding what they are looking for. By using these metrics, you can better understand how to optimize your content to keep visitors engaged and coming back for more.

5. They give an indication of how well your website is performing.

Measuring unique site visitors is an important metric for marketers as it helps to understand how successful their online marketing efforts are. Tracking the number of unique visitors to a website gives marketers valuable insight into how well their content marketing campaigns, SEO techniques, and social media channels are performing. By understanding the number of unique visitors to the website, marketers can better understand the reach and size of their site’s audience, as well as the profitability of their website, webpage, or advertising campaigns. Additionally, tracking the number of unique visitors to a website can help marketers set targets and goals to increase their brand’s reach, as well as measure the success of their online marketing efforts. By increasing the number of unique visitors to their website, marketers can increase their potential new customer base, as well as create more opportunities for their business.

6. They can help you to identify areas of improvement for your website.

Measuring unique site visitors is a great way to gain insight into the success of your website and can help you to improve it. Knowing the number of unique visitors to your website gives you an indication of how well your marketing campaigns, SEO and other efforts are paying off. By tracking the number of unique visitors and analyzing the data, you can identify areas that need improvement, such as whether your choice of keywords is accurate, or whether your content is resonating with your audience. Additionally, you can use the number of unique visitors as a target or a goal to work towards, such as aiming to increase the number of unique visitors to your web page over a certain period of time. All of this data can help you to better understand how your website is performing and how to improve it.

7. They allow you to compare the success of different web pages.

The web analytics tools mentioned above allow you to compare the success of different web pages by measuring the unique visitors to each page. This is an important metric that can be used to measure the profitability of a website, webpage or advertising campaign as well as direct sales of a product or the amount of advertising revenue a webpage brings in. Additionally, tracking the frequency of unique visitors on a monthly or daily basis with Google Analytics further helps to understand the size of your audience and use the data to drive your digital strategy.

8. They can be used to track the growth of your website over time.

Measuring the number of unique visitors to a website over time can be an important way to track a website’s growth. By tracking this metric, businesses can get an understanding of the size of their audience and use the data to develop their digital strategy. Tracking unique visitors can also help businesses measure the success of their content marketing campaigns, the effectiveness of their SEO efforts, the reach of their social media channels, and the impact of their online marketing efforts. It can also be used as a target or goal to work towards, and can help a business increase their brand awareness, as well as attract more potential customers. Ultimately, tracking unique visitors can be a great way to measure the growth of a website over time.

9. They can be used to measure the effectiveness of your SEO tactics.

Measuring the number of unique visitors to a website can be used to measure the effectiveness of SEO tactics, as it gives an indication of the reach and popularity of the website, and the size of the audience the website has. This data can be used to track the success of content marketing campaigns, how effectively SEO tactics are used, the impact of social media channels, and the accuracy of keywords. By analyzing this data, marketers can understand how successful they are in attracting customers, and then use this insight to further develop their online marketing strategies. This can involve simply setting a goal to increase the number of unique visitors to the website, or specifically targeting a certain channel, such as social media, to boost the website’s reach. Ultimately, by increasing the number of unique visitors to the website, the company is expanding its potential customer base and increasing its overall growth.

10. They make it possible to understand which parts of your website are attracting the most attention.

Measuring unique site visitors helps you understand which parts of your website are attracting the most attention by giving you a clear insight into how successfully you are attracting customers. By tracking and analyzing your audience size, you will be able to determine the impact of your marketing and outreach efforts, such as on-page SEO, link building, and other campaigns. This data can then be used to optimize your website and fine-tune your digital strategy. By determining the success of your content marketing, keyword accuracy, and social media engagement, you’ll be able to identify the parts of your website that are most successful in driving traffic and converting leads.

How to Calculate the Number of Unique Site Visitors

Step 1: Log into your Google Analytics dashboard.

Step 2: Click on ‘Audience’ located on the left sidebar.

Step 3: Click on ‘Overview’. This will give you a graph at the top of the page, which shows you the number of users and unique visitors that have come to your site in the last 30 days.

Step 4: To get a more accurate insight into the extent of the outreach of your site, you need to calculate the number of unique visitors.

Step 5: To do this, measure the traffic your website receives in terms of visits and unique visitors. Visits involve calculating how many times users visit your website and unique visitors are the number of individuals who have chosen to access your page, regardless of the number of times they have visited.

Step 6: To view the total number of unique visitors, you need to analyze the data using analytics software such as Google Analytics. You can slice and dice unique visitors for just about any time period, such as daily, weekly and monthly.

Step 7: Beginners will sometimes take a daily number and multiply it by 30 to predict a monthly number. However, this doesn’t work because of repeat visits by the same unique visitors.

Step 8: To measure the growth or decline in audience, compare the most recent month with the same month of the prior year.

Step 9: Finally, track your website’s unique visitor number to understand the size and reach of your website’s audience.

What is a unique site visitor?

A unique site visitor is a person who visits a website at least once in a specified time frame. By tracking unique visits, you can get an understanding of how many people are seeing your content for the first time and adjust your campaigns accordingly. Unique visitors are distinguished from return visitors, who are people who have already been to the website before. This is tracked by measuring the number of distinct internet users who access a webpage using a distinct Internet Protocol (IP) address. This metric is helpful in understanding the actual size of a website’s audience, as well as gauging visitor satisfaction.

How do you calculate unique site visitors?

Calculating unique site visitors is a key metric for determining a website’s reach and engagement. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to calculate unique visitors:

  • Open Google Analytics and click on the Audience tab and then select Overview.
  • A graph will appear at the top of the page. It will show both the number of users and unique visitors that have accessed your site in the last 30 days.
  • Take note of the “sessions”, which is the number of times a unique visitor has come to your site.
  • To get a more accurate view of your website’s outreach, you will want to measure the number of unique visitors.
  • To do this, you can use analytics software such as Google Analytics to calculate the number of unique visitors for any given time period. The most common periods are daily, weekly and monthly.
  • You can also compare the total number of unique visitors to the same month of the prior year to measure growth or decline.
  • It’s important to note that the same user will be counted as two different unique visitors if they access your website from two different IP addresses.

How is a website cookie used to track visitor data?

A website cookie is used to track visitor data by uniquely identifying browsers when they visit a website. When a user visits a website, a small piece of data, known as a cookie, is stored on their computer. This cookie contains information that can be used to distinguish the individual user from other browser users. By keeping track of these unique identifiers, website owners are able to determine how many unique visitors their website has received.

To track unique visitors, website owners can use several different methods. The most common way is by creating and storing cookies on the user’s computer. When a user visits a website, the cookie is read and stored. This cookie then acts as an anonymous identifier that allows the website to track the visitor’s movements. In addition to cookies, IP addresses can also be used to track visitors. Every device that connects to the internet has a unique IP address, which can be used to determine individual users.

Analytics tools can be used to calculate the number of unique visitors a website receives. These tools provide website owners with data on the number of visitors, their movements around the website, and their engagement with the content. This data can then be used to develop better marketing strategies and improve user experience.

Cookies are a useful way of tracking visitors to a website, as they provide a way to identify individual users and track their movements. However, they have some limitations. For example, they can’t always accurately determine the number of unique visitors, as a single person may have multiple cookies, or a family may use one computer but be counted as one unique visitor. Nevertheless, tracking unique visitors is an important metric for website owners, as it gives them an insight into the performance of their website.

What metrics are used to measure website traffic?

What metrics are used to measure website traffic? [Expanded list]

In addition to the number of unique visitors, there are several other key metrics that marketers can use to measure website traffic. Some of these metrics include: total page views, identified visitors, visits, viewed pages, downloads, time on site, bounce rate, traffic sources, and value per visit. Popular web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Yandex.Metrica, can be used to track these metrics and get a better understanding of website performance. Knowing the total number of unique visitors and the average visits count will help you gain insight into how interested visitors are in your website and how successful your SEO and marketing efforts are.

What data is used to analyze website user behavior?

Data used to analyze website user behavior includes cookies, browser identification, IP addresses, registration, and panel data. Additionally, tools like Google Analytics, Alexa, Quantcast, and SimilarWeb can be used to measure user or visitor data over a given time period, while filtering out automated activity and identifying known bot IP addresses. By understanding user behavior and traffic levels, companies can have a better insight into their website performance and build up a reliable view on their performance against competitors within the sector.

How is an analytics report used to measure conversion goals?

An analytics report is used to measure conversion goals by setting up a specific measurement for a certain action that the user takes. To do this, one must use a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Yandex.Metrica. Once the tool is installed, the user will be able to use various reports to track the goals.

First, the user will select the Conversions > Goals section in the analytics report. Then, the user can create an eCommerce report to view metrics such as total sales, conversion rate, traffic sources, and more. Additionally, the user can look at the Demographics, System, Mobile, and Language reports to get a better understanding of the audience. Additionally, the user can use the Geo/Location report to drill down to individual cities or countries. Finally, the user can add a segment in the main audience report page to measure the split between mobile and desktop users.

How is a website’s search engine optimization used to increase rankings?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical tool for improving a website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is used to optimize a website’s content and structure, increasing its visibility and making it easier for users to find it. There are several key steps to improving your website’s rankings in SERPs:

  • Research Keywords: Research which keywords your target audience is using when searching for content related to your website.
  • On-page SEO: Create content that is relevant to your target keyword(s), and use headings, meta tags, and other HTML elements to make sure your content can be indexed correctly by search engines.
  • Link Building: Invest in link building strategies such as guest posting, creating content for other websites, and other forms of outreach to increase links to your website from other websites.
  • Monitor Results: Use analytics tools to monitor your website’s rankings, and make any adjustments that may be necessary to improve rankings, such as additional keyword research or changes to the website structure.

By following these steps, you can use search engine optimization to increase your website’s rankings in SERPs and make sure your website is seen by the right people.

What are the benefits of using web analytics tools to track website usage?

The benefits of using web analytics tools to track website usage are numerous. They can provide invaluable insight into who is visiting your website, how they are engaging with it, and how you can improve their experience. Here are some of the key benefits:

  • Get detailed insights into user behavior: Web analytics tools can provide detailed data about how users are navigating your website, which pages they are visiting, and how long they are spending on each page. This insight into user behavior can be invaluable for understanding user intentions and improving website performance.
  • Measure ROI of campaigns: By tracking the number of unique visitors to your website, you can gain an understanding of how successful your campaigns are. You can measure how many people the campaigns have reached and determine their overall effectiveness.
  • Monitor website performance: Web analytics tools can provide detailed performance metrics such as page loading times and page size. This can help you identify any areas where your website may be underperforming and take steps to improve it.
  • Identify and target new customers: By tracking unique visitors, you can identify potential new customers and target them with specific messages. This can be a great way to increase conversions and build brand loyalty.
  • Monitor the competition: Web analytics tools can also help you measure your competitors’ performance. This can provide insight into their strategies and enable you to better position your own business.

Overall, web analytics tools provide a wealth of data that can help you improve your website’s performance, identify and target new customers, and stay ahead of the competition.

How can website analysis software be used to measure profitability?

Website analysis software, such as Google Analytics, can be used to measure the profitability of a website, page, or advertising campaign. To do this, users must first set up conversion goals and track them. For example, a goal could be to measure the number of unique visitors that download a product or click on a form submission. Once a goal is set up, users can track it under the Conversion > Goals section in Google Analytics.

From there, marketers can calculate the cost per lead by assessing the money spent on developing and advertising the website and dividing that by the number of unique visitors. This figure is then compared to the value per visit to determine the profitability of the website or campaign. If the value per visit exceeds the cost per lead, then a profit is generated. Otherwise, it is important to identify any changes that can be made to improve performance.

Overall, tracking the number of unique visitors to a website can be an effective way to measure profitability. By using website analysis software, such as Google Analytics, users can set up goals and track relevant metrics to determine how well their website or campaign is performing.

What are the GDPR regulations regarding cookie consent and data transfers?

The GDPR regulations regarding cookie consent and data transfers classify as data protection laws, which require businesses to obtain consent from users before collecting, processing, and transferring their personal data. This includes cookies, which are used to store information about users’ activity on a website.

Under GDPR, businesses must provide users with an opt-in consent before tracking activity via cookies or any other method. Additionally, they must inform users of the type of data they are collecting and how it will be used. Additionally, if personal data is transferred outside of the European Union, organizations must ensure that the data is adequately protected.

Quietly Insights

Pageviews vs Unique Pageviews in Google Analytics

by Quietly Insights | Aug 15, 2017 | Insights | 0 comments

Pageviews vs Unique Pageviews in Google Analytics

Your Google Analytics panel holds a lot of information, but one of the most popular and basic metrics is pageviews. There’s a bit more to a pageview than you’d think, so we’re breaking down how to understand pageviews versus unique pageviews on Google Analytics.

What is a Pageview?

Google defines a single pageview as “a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code.” However, most of the time we visit multiple pages when we go to websites. Multiple pageviews are defined as “the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.”

So what is a pageview in plain English? Essentially, it’s the number of times someone visits any page on your site. Your total pageview count goes up when a user:

  • Lands on a page on your website
  • Clicks “reload” after reaching the page
  • Returns to a page on your website they’ve already viewed

How is a Unique Pageview Different?

Unique pageviews are a little different than pageviews. Here’s what Google Analytics says: “A unique pageview aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session.”

Simply put, unique pageviews combine the pageviews that are from the same person (a user in Google Analytics ), on the same page, in the same session, and just count them as one. Unique pageviews are tracked for each page URL and page title combination. A user could view the same page 15 times, and refresh it multiple times as well—but if all of the views come in one session, it only counts as one unique pageview.

Pageviews Versus Unique Pageviews in Google Analytics

Let’s look at some scenarios to see how Google counts all these things.

  • Your visit to this page right now counts as one pageview.
  • If you reload this specific page, we will go up to two pageviews, but it’ll still be one unique pageview.
  • If you send the link to a friend and they visit (thanks), that’s three pageviews and two unique pageviews.
  • If you come back to this page tomorrow in a separate session, we will have four pageviews and three unique pageviews.

The Bottom Line

Pageviews allow you to track how web traffic interacts with your site. Since unique pageviews filter out page refreshes and multiple pageviews in a single session, you are provided with a more accurate look at the amount of traffic coming in. This makes it easier for you to see what pages drive the most traffic, and what content people are actually interested in. All that should inform what content you put on your website and help you figure out how to get more unique pageviews.

Do you want help getting your unique pageview count up? Call in the pros at Quietly . 

Image Credit: Rawpixel / Shutterstock, Inc.

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  • Unique Pageviews vs Pageviews – Metrics Simplified Series

Last Updated on October 2, 2020 by Ritwik B

Understanding the difference between Unique Pageviews & Pageviews is a must if you’re in a digital field.

Many times you might get confused looking at these metrics & wonder:-

  • Why is one greater (or less) than the other? Or
  • How are these metrics computed?
  • How to gain value from these metrics?
  • How do GA filters & segments work on these metrics?
  • & so on…

In this post, we’ll answer all these questions & also…

you’ll be able to experiment with a special tool that will help you understand how these metrics work internally.

Let’s first start by understanding…

What is Unique Pageview & Pageview?

As per the definition by Google,

 A  unique pageview  represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

The most IMPORTANT word in the above definition is the word “ SESSION “.  First of all, understand that a unique pageview is a session-level metric. (i.e it has a session-level scope).

Next…

Let’s look at how is unique pageview calculated by google analytics.

As per Google Analytics content overview report ,

Unique Pageviews is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. A unique pageview is counted for each  page URL + page Title combination.

Whereas, the pageview is defined as:

The total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

It is simply a counter for page re-load.

Let’s move on to examples to get a more clear picture.

Now let’s try to understand this through a practical example. Say, a user has viewed 5 pages on a website in the following order.

This is what gets reported in analytics: (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages)

Unique Pageviews - Path of User

Observations:

  • A user has visited /page-1 twice in the same session. So for ‘/page-1’, the pageview metrics will simply be 2.
  • Now as per the unique pageviews definition, the number of sessions in which the /page-1 was viewed is one. So you can see 1 unique pageview for /page-1.
  • Similarly, the page-2 and page-3 have 1-1 unique pageviews.

Remember…

A Pageview is a hit level metric & Unique Pageview is a session-level metric.

So, with every page load, the pageview count increases by one, while the unique pageview count (for a particular page) increases only once per session.

To know more about Sessions and hits, check Google Analytics – Sessions & Hits – Metrics Simplified Series .

Unique Pageview vs Other Metrics

Here’s the great google analytics page metric simulation tool you can try out.

You can enter the page path the user takes on the website . For Eg: page URL as “pageA” then “pageB” & so on..

google analytics metric simulation tool

You can create different scenarios & check what the final metric values are. Feel free to try it out.

FAQs related to Unique Pageviews & Pageviews

Why are the total unique pageviews higher than the session.

  • Don’t confuse the unique pageview metric with the total number of sessions. Some of them try to compare the total unique pageview (3 in the above image) with total sessions in the Audience Overview report (1 session). There might be sessions that viewed one or more pages.

Can a single user have multiple unique page views?

  • Yes. A unique pageview is a session-level metric. A single user can have multiple sessions and can generate multiple Unique page views for a specific page (i.e one per session).

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Ritwik is a Web Analyst & Product Marketer. He loves to write technical & easy to understand blogs for Marketers & Entrepreneurs. Focused on Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Tag Management, Marketing & Automation Scripts & more. Google Certified Professional. A Firm Believer in Teaching -> Learning -> Growing. :)

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Great explanation Ritwiik, thanks! I am another web analytics geek 🙂

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Thanks Karem..!! That’s great..!! 🙂 .

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Privacy Overview

Sessions vs. Users vs. Pageviews in Google Analytics: Everything You Need to Know

unique page visits

Table of contents

Whether you’re new to Google Analytics or have been using it to track website performance for years, it is easy to get overwhelmed by all of the different metrics you can track

One of the biggest sources of confusion is around sessions vs. users vs. pageviews––what are the differences between these metrics? When should you track each of them? What unique insights does each metric provide?

In this post, we’re going to outline the key differences, how to track each one, as well as some advanced tips. 

  • What are users?
  • What are sessions?

What are pageviews?

What is a good pages per session in google analytics.

  • How to track sessions and users in Google Analytics
  • How to track and visualize sessions and users in Databox
  • Additional tips for tracking both sessions and users

Google Analytics Website Engagement Dashboard Template by Databox

What are users? 

“Users” are Google Analytics’ way of defining unique visitors.

In fact, up until 2014, the user metric was called “unique visitors” in Google Analytics. 

Any time a new visitor lands on your website, Google Analytics assigns them a unique ID, or client ID, that’s stored in a cookie in your browser.

So say you visited our website in Chrome, your Chrome browser received a Google Analytics cookie with a client ID. When you return, GA will then log you as a returning user rather than a new visitor.

If, however, you visit our website a second time, this time using Safari, you’d receive a separate client ID, and therefore GA would recognize you as two users.

“Users” and “Sessions” are vastly different, as one user can log multiple sessions on your website.

What are sessions? 

Google Analytics records a session every single time someone visits your website. A session starts right away when someone loads a page and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Every pageview, click, transaction, etc., tracked during this period of activity makes up one “Session.”

If that same visitor comes back several hours later, or the next day, a new session is counted. Therefore one person can log multiple sessions.

For that reason, it’s not a great measure for tracking unique website visits (which is how many marketers wrongly use this metric.) There’s often a discrepancy between “Sessions” in Google Analytics and “Visits” in other performance-tracking tools because of how GA defines a session.

As Bryan Ng of Coup 365 says, “Users are unique, and sessions are how many times a page was being visited. User (Z) can visit your webpage 10 times, and that counts 10 sessions and 1 user. User (Y) visits the same webpage 5 times, and that counts 5 sessions and 1 user. Webpage total: 15 sessions and 2 users.” 

A “Pageview” is any view of a page that is being tracked by Google Analytics.

It’s a fairly generous measurement as if you land on a page, that’s a pageview. If you reload that same page, it counts as another. If you leave the page and come right back, it’s yet another pageview—all from the same page and user.

What’s the difference between sessions, users, and pageviews? 

The biggest difference is that a user can have multiple sessions, but they would still only be counted as one user. Taking it a step further, one user can log dozens of pageviews across multiple sessions (spanning several days).

“A user is an individual person who has come to your site whereas a session represents one of those visits to your site,” says Mark Barrera of TrustRadius . “So, a person could come once or many times, and that wouldn’t increment the ‘user’ count but would increase the number of sessions.” 

Amanda Lanier of Cape and Bay says, “Think users as the number of unique visitors coming to your website. Once they visit once, they will not be counted again unless they are visiting on a new device or have cleared their cookies. Sessions are the number of visits your site has, from both new and returning users. Tracking these metrics in Google Analytics is a simple way to see where users are landing and whether people are staying to engage with content or bouncing off the page.” 

Ayushi Sharma of iFour Technolab adds, “Sessions – can be defined as the group of communications that happen on an individual’s website or application during a certain period of time. When any visitor visits on the website, his session cookies get activated i.e. his session starts. The significance of the session is that it provides the website owner an exact figure of the number of time visitors opened his website or an application and has carried out activities as well as transactions.

Users are basically the visitor who has begun one session with an individual’s website or either an application within a definite time-frame. There are new users and returning users, according to Google Analytics. Website owners can keep track of the number of users on your website using cookies based on JavaScript. This helps them to improve their website content and SEO.” 

What is more important to track: Users or Sessions? 

The answer is – it depends on your business and specific goals. For the marketers we surveyed, nearly 59% of them prioritize tracking sessions over users.

unique page visits

However, some of the marketers preferred a hybrid approach where they weighed users as more important for certain goals and sessions for others. 

Greg Cruce of Venn Marketing says, “Sessions and Users together show us how often visitors come to our site.” 

For example, Nicholas Zinkie of The Honey Baked Ham Company says, “I use sessions to track the overall flow to a site from specific channels as the first indicator of its effectiveness to lead top of the funnel traffic into a site and users to understand which channels are effectively engaging those visitors.” 

“Sessions is a good metric to understand how attractive your site is and how well you’re doing as a marketer to attract users to your site,” adds Chris Wilks of BrandExtract . “Users are a good metric to understand the number of people who are seeing (and hopefully interacting with) your content.” 

How many pages per session is good? According to Databox’s own Benchmark data, the median number of pages per session for B2B companies is  1.89 . This benchmark was calculated from anonymized data from close to 500 companies.

Are you a B2B company and want to benchmark your marketing performance, including Sessions, Users, Pageviews, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate, and more, against other companies like yours?  Join the benchmark group  for free.

pages per session for B2B

For B2C companies, the median value is higher – 2.05 , to be precise. 

This benchmark was calculated from anonymized data from close to 500 companies. Are you a B2C company and want to benchmark your marketing performance against hundreds of other companies like yours? Join the Benchmark Group for free . 

pages per session B2C

*Important note: Databox Benchmark Groups show median values. The median is calculated by taking the “middle” value, the value for which half of the observations are larger and half are smaller. The average is calculated by adding up all of the individual values and dividing this total by the number of observations. While both are measures of central tendency, when there is a possibility of extreme values, the median is generally the better measure to use.

Benchmark Your Performance Against Hundreds of Companies Just Like Yours

Viewing benchmark data can be enlightening, but seeing where your company’s efforts rank against those benchmarks can be game-changing. 

Browse Databox’s open Benchmark Groups and join ones relevant to your business to get free and instant performance benchmarks. 

How do you track Sessions and Users in Google Analytics? 

Tracking the number of users and sessions in Google Analytics is simple using the Audience Overview Report.  

You can go to Audience and then Overview . Then, you’ll be able to view the number of users and sessions side-by-side. 

unique page visits

Now, you can take this a step further by going to the Acquisition section, and clicking on All Traffic. 

Then, you can see the number of sessions, % of new sessions, and new users by channel, treemaps, source/medium, and referrals. 

Filtering by Source/Medium can be particularly helpful for not only identifying your top traffic sources for new users but also understanding how “sticky” each source is. 

unique page visits

You can also filter by Google Ad Campaigns, specific paid keywords, and UTM Campaigns. 

To learn more about reporting in Google Analytics , check out our comprehensive guide that covers standard and custom report in GA, dimensions, metrics and much more.

How to track and visualize Sessions and Users in Databox 

While you can certainly track sessions, users, and pageviews in Google Analytics, it’s not always easy to visualize the data in a way that’s accessible to everyone.

So, here are some recommendations on the different ways you can track these metrics in Databox as well as the various ways you can visualize them.

PRO TIP: How to track these 10 popular Google Analytics 4 metrics

Sure, there are dozens (and dozens?) more Google Analytics 4 metrics you could track. But, starting with these 10 commonly tracked metrics will give you a pretty high-level view of how your marketing is working…

  • Sessions : The number of sessions can tell you how many times people are returning to your website. Obviously, the higher the better.
  • Sessions by organic keyword : Which organic keywords bring in the most traffic to your website? This may help you determine whether your SEO investments are paying off.
  • Bounce rate : Do visitors leave shortly after landing on your website? Or do they stick around?
  • Average session duration : How much time are people spending on your website? Users with a high average session duration are most likely relevant to your company.
  • Goal completions : How many users responded to your call to action?

If you want to track these in Google Analytics, you might find the visualizations limiting. It’s also a bit time-consuming to combine all the metrics you need in one view.

To better understand how your website performs in terms of traffic growth and conversions, we’ve made this plug-and-play dashboard that contains all the essential metrics for understanding how successful you are at optimizing different aspects of your website.

ga4-website-engagement-dashboard-template-featured-section

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

This is the number of first-time users during a specified date range, such as the last 7 days, 30 days, month, or month-to-date. This is particularly helpful for understanding if your site is growing week-over-week or month-over-month.

You can visualize this using a basic line graph showing daily fluctuations. This will help you associate any spikes/dips with specific initiatives you’re running.

unique page visits

Sessions / Users by Landing Page

This is the number of sessions/users who have initiated at least one session during the specified date range split up by landing page.  For example, if you are running a paid ad campaign, you’ll want to monitor the number of users on each landing page.

Visualizing this metric in a table format in Databox allows you to quickly spot which pages are increasing or declining in terms of generating new users over a specific time period.

unique page visits

Sessions / Users by Organic Keyword

Sessions/users who have initiated at least one session during the specified date range split up by organic keywords. Content marketers and SEO professionals can use this information to get a clearer picture of what search terms are driving the most users to their website.

Sessions / Users by Source

Sessions/users who have initiated at least one session during the specified date range split up by sources. This allows you to understand what sources – like Google, Linkedin, or Twitter  – are driving the most users to your website. 

This allows you to monitor which channels are worth investing more time into and which ones might need an adjustment in terms of approach.

unique page visits

% of New Sessions

The percentage of sessions that are created by new users (first-time visits) during the specified date range. For example, if you have a high % of sessions from new users, this could indicate that your site isn’t sticky enough to get people to come back a second time.  

This is another metric that’s helpful to view in a line graph in order to monitor daily fluctuations and how the content you’re producing is influencing it.

unique page visits

Sessions by Social Network

The number of sessions during a specified date range split up by social networks. This is helpful for understanding what social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, drive the most engaged visitors on your site. 

unique page visits

Sessions by Channel 

The number of sessions during a specified date range split up by channels, such as Organic Search, Social, or Referrals. This is helpful for knowing which channels are delivering your most engaged traffic.

The pie graph visualization in Databox is perfect for tracking this metric so you and others can quickly monitor which channels are driving a higher proportion of website traffic.

unique page visits

Sessions by New vs. Returning Users

The number of sessions during a specified date range split up by new vs. returning users. This allows you to see how engaged users are with your site. If you have a large percentage of users are completing multiple sessions, this means that your site is engaging. 

Another great pie graphic visualization can be used here in Databox in order to quickly monitor how well your website performs in terms of generating new visitors as well as re-engaging “old” ones.

unique page visits

Sessions by Location

The number of sessions during the specified date range split up by location. This allows you to see which countries are driving the most engaged users.

Visualizing this in a table in Databox allows you to quickly spot any trends by specific locations so you can make any necessary adjustments to your strategy.

unique page visits

We recommend tracking Pageviews using a cumulative line graph so that you can more easily monitor growth (or declines) compared to performance month-or-over month.

Are your pageviews growing month-over-month? If not, you can spot it quickly here and make any needed adjustments.

unique page visits

Top Pages by Pageviews

Which pages on your website generate the most pageviews? We recommend using the table visualization in order to quickly spot your high-performers so you can leverage them in other ways.

unique page visits

How to decide on when to track Users and/or Sessions

Decide on whether to prioritize sessions or users .

“There are strengths and weaknesses for each metric,” says Bruce Hogan of SoftwarePundit says. “Sessions tend to be better for understanding a website’s conversion rate, as each person can make multiple purchases over time. In contrast, users are a key metric for measuring retention or churn.” 

Muhammad Tahir Iqbal of AbayaMarket.com agrees, “The important metrics for eCommerce business are sessions per user which correlate to eCommerce revenue.” 

Jason Dodge of BlackTruck Media + Marketing adds, “Depending on the goals of your site, users or sessions could be viewed as more valuable than one another. We tend to see user metrics as more valuable than sessions, especially for those measuring lead generation. Any point of data gathering for a service inquiry or contact form means users are the most important.”

Nicholas Chimonas of Local SEO Guide says, “I’m more interested in user data when it comes to SEO than # of sessions unless a product/service typically has a high # of recurring sessions before conversion.”

“The advantage of users is they can be hooked by marketing automation,” says Tim Absalikov of Lasting Trend . “Also, from them, you can get more interesting demographic and behavioral information. This information will give you, in addition to obvious analytics, the ability to train the neural networks included in your marketing technology stack.”

Sarah Lukemire of Brindle Digital Marketing adds, “At Brindle, we mainly focus on the number of users, but sessions provide helpful insight into how loyal your users are, i.e. how often has that user revisited your site in the defined reporting period? Looking at Sessions can also be helpful when looking at the bigger picture of your goals and other metrics. For example, if your sessions have doubled, but conversions remained the same (or decreased), you might want to analyze the campaign further!” 

Track sessions to gauge site engagement 

“This metric matters because we discover whether visitors find our content valuable and want to visit our website again or not,” says Maysa Rabadi of The Perfect Mark . “It allows us to understand our customers and how we can better serve them as a website.” 

Freya Kuka of Collecting Cents says, “The more important metric between the two would have to be sessions since that puts emphasis on how many times your website was viewed by an interested party. It is also the metric big ad networks like Mediavine use to consider people who want to join their network. They have a minimum requirement of 25,000 sessions per month.

The reason sessions work so well as a metric is because they have repeatedly been found to be the best metric at understanding how an audience is interacting with a website.

Users only focus on how many individual people are interested in your website, while pageviews do not account for the individual visitor at all. 

Sessions are the perfect middle ground since they allow website owners to understand and make monetization decisions based on the available information.”

Or, as Shayan Fatani of PureVPN explains, “Think of sessions like impressions. The same person may get to see your Facebook post 100 times counting as 100 impressions. Similarly, if a user visits your page 100 times, it would count as 100 sessions, considering they use the same device or browser as the browser saves your cookies/session ids.” 

Emanuel Petrescu of Divorce Marketing Group says, “The number of sessions and the time spent on the website is the metric we’re after. A high number reflects that the user found relevant content on our website, and he’s spending the time reading and learning it.” 

“A user who has a high number of sessions is a good sign,” says Melanie Musson of AutoInsuranceEZ.com . “It means they’re interested and they’re likely to convert. If your session numbers are close to your user numbers, that’s an indication that the users aren’t hooked.” 

Rahul Mohanachandran of Kasera adds, “When tracking these metrics you need to analyze them both together and separately, users will show the number of unique users of a product and session can show the repeated use of the system by individual users.

In many cases, more sessions from a user mean higher engagement and repeated use of the system. But, a large number of sessions with shorter session duration can be a sign of some issues faced by the user. I highly recommend looking into the details further if you see users with a large number of sessions and shorter session durations.”

Look for patterns 

“The number of sessions on any site should always be higher than the number of users, however depending on the nature of your website and how users interact with it may not be significantly higher than user numbers,” says Daniel Richardson of Homes For Students . “Google Analytics is the easiest tool to use to track both users and sessions. When viewing your traffic, it is quick and easy to switch from sessions to users just by selecting in the drop-down menu. Do this frequently to ensure that there are no strange patterns appearing in users vs. sessions.”  

Monitor user growth 

“To a publisher like us, we’re interested in making sure the number of sessions we garner is greater than the number of users we have,” says Steven Li of Medius Ventures . “When we’re able to make that happen, it signals to us that we’ve done a good job with the pieces we publish such that we’re driving repeat traffic from the same people. That’s important to us as a partially subscription-driven business because higher engagement with specific users is what compels them to pay to read our exclusive content in the first place.

We look at user growth to track how well specific stories do with a broader audience, our top of the funnel, and generalize what makes them successful in motivating future stories.”

Analyze new vs. returning users 

“As a website owner, it is very important to track and monitor what kind of users are visiting,” says Jennifer Willy of Etia . “The term ‘users’ in layman’s understanding means the number of unique visitors that visit your site. These are the actual people landing on your website, and that means that if someone were to visit your site 100 times on the same device or browser, they would still only count as one unique user. These are calculated as Returning Users, according to Google Analytics.

When a paid advertisement boosts the awareness of your website, the new user’s metric compared against Source and Medium is helpful in indicating how successful these efforts were at bringing in new users.” 

Make sure you are bringing in quality traffic 

“Even with your users and sessions going up (this is usually a good sign depending on the channel they’re coming from), the most important thing to keep in mind is if the traffic coming to your site is qualified,” says Ben Johnston of Sagefrog Marketing Group . “Are a percentage of users taking the action, making the purchase, etc that you want them to? Sessions and users don’t mean much if it’s all vanity traffic that doesn’t convert. That said, a single user can take that desired action multiple times if they’re hitting your site, so sessions are usually more heavily considered as a success metric.” 

Use sessions and pageviews to track the ROI of your paid marketing campaigns

Golpar Saleh of Group3 Digital Agency adds, “If you want to know how well your marketing efforts are performing, you need to keep an eye on your unique pageviews and then sessions so that you know first how many new potential customers you’re attracting and then how engaging your website/product or service offering is.” 

Create content groupings based on page sessions 

“We like to keep a very close eye on the sessions so that we can see how long a user stays on a certain page, and if they click the links within that page to visit other similar content,” says Chris Gadek of AdQuick . “This helps us to better create content groupings (silos) and ensure that the user can find all of the information that they may find beneficial.”

In sum, users give you insight into how many people visit your site. Whereas sessions are the total number of visits.

Whether you choose to track users, sessions, or both, it doesn’t matter as long as the metric you choose aligns with your overall goals. 

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How Can I Increase my Website’s Pageviews?

whar-are-pageviews

This post was most recently updated on January 10th, 2024

One of the most important metrics to track is pageviews , which measures the number of times a page has been viewed by visitors. As Google Analytics is a widely used tool for tracking website traffic and user behavior, it’s essential to have a solid grasp of what pageviews are and how they work.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of pageviews in detail, along with tips on how to increase them and improve your website’s performance.

Pageviews definition

A simple definition for a page view can relate to a user viewing a web page. A user can also browse more than one page per website visit.

Google Analytics describes a pageview as the following:

“A view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code.” Also keep in mind, when a user visits more than one page, they are counted as additional pageviews.

Why are Pageviews Important?

Pageviews are a fundamental metric for website owners, advertisers, and publishers. Here are a few reasons why:

  • Pageviews affect website traffic and engagement: Pageviews are a measure of how many times a web page is viewed or loaded by a user. Higher pageviews can indicate that a website receives more traffic and engagement from its audience. By tracking pageviews, website owners can assess the popularity of their content and how users are interacting with their site.
  • Pageviews are used to measure website performance and user behavior: In addition to traffic and engagement, pageviews can help website owners measure various performance metrics. For example, tracking pageviews can reveal which pages on a website are most popular, how long users spend on each page, and how users navigate the site. This data can inform website design and content decisions, improving user experience and driving more traffic.
  • Pageviews can impact revenue and ad earnings for publishers: For publishers who monetize their website with advertising, pageviews are directly tied to ad revenue. The more pageviews a website has, the more ad impressions it can generate. This can lead to higher ad revenue and earnings for the publisher. Additionally, some advertisers may use pageviews as a key metric when evaluating the effectiveness of their ad campaigns, making pageviews a critical factor in the success of a publisher’s website.

By monitoring pageviews and optimizing their website accordingly, website owners and publishers can improve their site’s success and achieve their goals.

What are unique pageviews?

Unique pageviews are slightly different from the normal pageviews. Google Analytics refers to them as “pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session.” When a user visits a web page once or even multiple times during a specific session, it is counted as a unique pageview. From a Google Analytics point of view, a session usually relates to 24 hours.

Here’s an example to further illustrate the point: If a user visits page A, navigates to page B and then back to page A, each instance would be counted as a pageview. It would mean a total of 3 pageviews.

However, with unique pageviews, no matter how many times a user visits page A during a specific session, it will still be counted as 1 pageview. If the user were to follow the same pattern from page A to page B and then back to page A, it would mean a total of 2 unique page views.

How to see pageviews in Google Analytics

Finding pageviews in Google Analytics is very simple. You’ll need to set your website up for Google analytics and ensure it tracks visitors correctly. Once you’ve done that, be sure to take a look at the video below for a quick demonstration.

What are hits, visitors, and impressions, then?

Hits usually relate to file requests on a server. Although this is a good way to measure server traffic, it’s often inaccurate regarding website visitors and actual site usage. Here’s an example: when a user visits a page with one HTML text file and three images, it can result in 4 hits while it’s only one visitor generated those hits.

An impression is when a user views an ad on a page or when an ad is displayed on a webpage. Find out more about pageviews versus ad impressions here .

A visitor is a person that visits your website. Unique visitors usually are counted over a specific period or session and like unique pageviews can view a specific page many times over but still only be counted as one unique visitor.

What is the difference between pageviews and sessions?

Pageviews and sessions are two metrics used to measure website traffic and engagement, but they have distinct meanings. Here’s a breakdown of each metric:

  • Pageviews: A pageview is counted every time a web page is loaded or reloaded by a user. If a user refreshes a page or navigates to another page and then returns, it counts as an additional pageview.
  • Sessions: A session is a period of time during which a user interacts with a website. A session begins when a user enters a website and ends when they leave or are inactive for a specified period of time. The exact definition of a session can vary depending on how it is calculated, but it typically lasts anywhere from a few minutes to several hours.

While pageviews and sessions are related, they provide different insights into user behavior and website performance. Here are a few key differences:

  • Pageviews measure the number of times a page is loaded, while sessions measure the amount of time a user spends on a website.
  • Pageviews can indicate how many pages a user has viewed, while sessions can reveal how engaged a user is with the website.
  • Pageviews can be used to track the popularity of specific pages, while sessions can help identify user flow and navigation patterns.

To measure website performance effectively, it’s important to understand both pageviews and sessions and how they interact. For example, a high number of pageviews could indicate a popular website, but if those pageviews are from short sessions, it might suggest that users are not finding what they are looking for.

Conversely, a low number of pageviews could indicate a less popular website, but if those pageviews are from long sessions, it could suggest that users are highly engaged with the content. By looking at both metrics together, website owners can better understand their site’s performance and user behavior.

Best pageview tracking software and counters

Within the range of publishers working with MonetizeMore, Google Analytics is the most popular choice of pageview and traffic tracking software. What’s great about Google Analytics is that it’s free and integrates with other Google products such as Google Ad Manager and many more.

Remember that the free version of Google Analytics has limitations such as 10 million hits per month per website property. If your website generates more than 10 million hits, you must upgrade to Analytics 360. For further information on account and SDK limits read all about it here .

However, that does not mean that it’s the only option. Other software you can try out includes Clicky and Matomo . Both these tools have free and paid versions and offer a slightly different experience than Google Analytics.

How to get more pageviews?

Getting more pageviews relates to increasing your website traffic . Although this might be a simple question to ask, many methods exist, each that would merit a blog post if not a course of its own.

Here’s a quick summary of methods for you to try out and do further research on:

Social traffic: This can include building a social media following on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Alternatively, post your latest articles in Facebook groups. You can even create videos on YouTube or build a YouTube channel.

Here are more tips and examples for driving social media traffic.

Paid traffic: This can include buying traffic through sources such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, native advertising, media buys, and many more.

Here are 5 paid traffic sources to take a look at.

Organic traffic/SEO: SEO is also known as search engine optimization and relates to optimizing website content in such a way that search engines want it, ranking high for specific keywords and generating organic traffic.

Here’s a beginners guide to SEO.

Improve website content and design: High-quality, engaging content and a well-designed website can help keep users on your site longer and encourage them to view more pages. Some ways to optimize your content and design include:

  • Creating clear, easy-to-read headlines and subheadings.
  • Including visually appealing images and videos.
  • Breaking up text into short paragraphs and using bullet points and lists.
  • Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.

Use analytics tools: Analytics tools such as Google Analytics can help you track and analyze your website’s pageviews and user behavior. By reviewing this data, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your website. Some metrics to track include:

  • Bounce rate: The percentage of users who leave your site after viewing only one page.
  • Time on site: The average amount of time users spend on your site.
  • Pages per session: The average number of pages viewed per session.
  • Exit pages: The pages where users are most likely to leave your site.

Also, check out this list of 25 ways to increase website traffic from WordStream .

Pageviews play a critical role in the life of a successful online publisher. However, there are many more metrics to consider and understand such as those mentioned in our AdTech for dummies page where we define over 80 industry-related terms.

Do you have millions of pageviews but don’t know how to monetize them effectively? At MonetizeMore, we’re experts at monetization and ad optimization and can help you maximize your ad revenue! Sign up for a Starter account at MonetizeMore today!

What are pageviews in Google Analytics?

It’s a view of a specific page on your site that is being tracked by the Google Analytics tracking code.

How do I find unique pageviews in Google Analytics?

Go to Google Analytics > Behaviour > Overview

What is the difference between pageviews and unique pageviews?

When a user visits a page during a session (24 hour period), it counts as one page view and then adds up the more they view it. However, no matter how many times a user visits a specific web page during a session (24 hour period), it will only count as a unique page view.

How Can I Increase my Website's Pageviews? MonitizeMore

With over seven years at the forefront of programmatic advertising, Aleesha is a renowned Ad-Tech expert, blending innovative strategies with cutting-edge technology. Her insights have reshaped programmatic advertising, leading to groundbreaking campaigns and 10X ROI increases for publishers and global brands. She believes in setting new standards in dynamic ad targeting and optimization.

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"NET RPM increased 61.3% compared to our yearly average before working with MonetizeMore, and NET Revenues increased 54.8%. There is no doubt that turning over the day-to-day management of our ad inventory to MonetizeMore's team of experts has been the right move for our business."

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What is a page views: and what is the difference with visits?

unique page visits

Marie Jehanne

October 5, 2023 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Oct 5, 2023

Table of Contents

What is a page view?

What are page visits, comparing what is page views and page visits in website analytics, what are the differences in terms of user interaction.

In the context of website analytics, a fundamental understanding of key terms such as “Page Views” and “Page Visits” is crucial for effective digital marketing strategies. These terms offer insights into website traffic, essential for enhancing your online presence. Understanding the difference between these terms is paramount in interpreting Google Analytics data accurately, which in turn, influences your SEO strategies. Page views and page visits are not synonymous in the world of website analytics.

Each term represents a unique aspect of user interaction on the customer journey of them in your website.

Misinterpretation of these terms can lead to a skewed analysis of your website traffic, impacting your digital marketing decisions and online presence.

The following sections delve into the specifics of these two key terms.

The aim is to provide a comprehensive understanding of these metrics, allowing for an accurate interpretation of website analytics. This knowledge is crucial for creating effective digital marketing strategies and enhancing your online presence.

In the realm of website analytics , a Page View refers to the number of times a specific page on your website is loaded or reloaded in a browser. Page Views are generated by both new and returning visitors.

By tracking this metric in Google Analytics, you can gain insights into the effectiveness of your SEO strategies. A high number of Page Views signifies that your website or a specific page on your website is attracting significant website traffic. However, it’s important to note that a single visitor can generate multiple Page Views if they reload the page or revisit it within a single session.

Therefore, Page Views is a raw measure of your website’s traffic. While it provides a broad picture of your site’s popularity, it does not offer a nuanced understanding of user interaction or engagement on your site.

For a more detailed analysis, it is necessary to consider other metrics, like Page Visits, bounce rate, and click-through rate, as well.

unique page visits

Know what drives engagement and abandonment on your sites and mobile apps .

When we speak about what is a page views, it’s necessary to talk about page visits! Page Visits, also known as sessions, refer to a series of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. A single Page Visit can encompass multiple Page Views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions.

A session begins when a user lands on your website and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at midnight. If the same user returns to your site after a session has ended, a new session is initiated, and it is counted as another Page Visit. Therefore, Page Visits provide a more comprehensive measure of user engagement on your site compared to Page Views.

They offer insights into how users are interacting with your site during a single session, which can be invaluable for understanding user behavior and optimizing your site’s user experience.

However, like all metrics, Page Visits should not be viewed in isolation but considered in conjunction with other relevant metrics for a holistic analysis of your website’s performance.

In the realm of digital marketing and website analytics , understanding the distinction between page views and page visits is fundamental. These two metrics are integral aspects of user interaction analysis, providing valuable insights into a website’s performance and user engagement. Page views, also known as page impressions in Google Analytics, refer to the total number of times a particular webpage has been interacted with or viewed by users. This figure includes repeated views of a single page during one internet browsing session, meaning if a user reloads the page or revisits the same page, each instance is counted as a separate page view.

Page visits, on the other hand, are synonymous with sessions or user sessions in Google Analytics.

A page visit represents the duration from when a user first lands on your website to when they exit your site or become inactive for a specific period, typically 30 minutes. During a single visit, a user may view multiple pages, contributing to the website’s overall page views, but it will still count as one visit in terms of website traffic.

Decoding the Retail Customer Journey: A Detailed Approach and Best Practices

The primary difference between page views and page visits lies in the user interaction they each represent. Page views are a more granular metric, focusing on individual pages and their popularity.

They can reveal which content is most engaging or attractive to users, offering insight into user preferences and the effectiveness of the content in enhancing online presence. Conversely, page visits provide a broader view of user interaction. They indicate the overall website traffic a site receives, irrespective of the number of pages viewed during a visit.

This metric is particularly useful in understanding the reach of a website and measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies in driving traffic. In the context of SEO, both page views and page visits are critical.

High page views can suggest engaging content, which can improve a site’s ranking in search engine results and positively impact the click-through rate. Simultaneously, a high number of page visits can indicate a successful marketing strategy, driving more traffic to the site and potentially reducing the bounce rate. In conclusion, while page views and page visits are different metrics in website analytics, they are both instrumental in understanding user interaction and improving a website’s online presence.

Depending on the specific goals of a website, one may be more relevant than the other. However, a comprehensive SEO strategy should consider both to achieve optimal results and improve website traffic.

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Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!

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Page Views vs Visits: What’s the Difference?

unique page visits

Pageviews, page visits, clicks, sessions, unique sessions, unique visitors –– these almost synonymous terms can confuse anyone. However, it’s important for business owners to understand the difference between page views vs visits to their website because they do not mean exactly the same thing. And though the difference between the two might seem small, understanding it could help your business improve its marketing efforts.

The problem is that different analytics tools use different terminology to describe the same customer behavior. In general, it’s best to think about page views and visits in this way: a page view occurs anytime someone loads or reloads a page on your site. It doesn’t matter how the person arrived at your site or how long they looked at it. Visits, on the other hand, happen only when a person arrives at your site from an outside source (such as an ad , or a SERP). Therefore, a single visit may contain multiple page views.

Here’s where things can get a bit confusing. First, it’s important to note that page views and clicks are not the same thing –– at least not in Google Analytics. In Google Ads reports, the “clicks” metric indicates the number of times someone clicked on one of your Google Ads. Pageviews, as defined above, track the number of times a page was loaded or reloaded by a visitor. Note, this includes views generated by organic traffic, direct searches , and advertisements. Again, one “click” may spark multiple page views.

Unique Page Views

In addition, Google separates page views even further. “Unique” page views, refer to the number of different pages a given visitor viewed during a session. In practice, this means that if a single visitor refreshed a single page three times during a thirty-minute period, Google Analytics will log three page views and one unique page view.

Visits and Sessions

Many times, a consumer will interact with the same website multiple times after they initially view it. Indeed, it’s not unusual for a consumer to open a page, close that page out, and search for that same website again a few minutes later. Typically a CMS or CRM will count this as two page visits –– since the visitor arrived at the site twice –– even though the visits occurred within the same session. A session is a period of thirty minutes that begins after a visitor first enters a site. During that session, visitors may generate multiple page views, and even multiple visits (as in the scenario described above).

Once thirty minutes has expired the session ends. If the same person goes back to your site an hour after initial contact, then Analytics will log it as a new session. (Analytics also tracks visitors as “users.” So if the same person initiates multiple sessions, the sessions are counted as unique, but not the user.)

What Does it All Mean?

The key to understanding marketing metrics is to appreciate their context. For instance, a blog post that inspires a huge number of page views, but a relatively low number of visitors, may not be as influential as it first appears. Pageviews are a valuable piece of raw data, but without a deeper understanding of your site and your customers’ behavioral patterns , they only represent a portion of your website’s performance.

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November 9, 2021 By Paul Koks 44 Comments

Advanced Guide to Page View Tracking in Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 collects page views by default. Read on if you want to enhance the basic implementation of GA4 to get the most out of page view measurements.

Analyzing page level data is very important when you want to optimize the performance of any website. As you probably know, the data model in GA4 is completely different from Universal Analytics. Page views are one of the many “events” that you can collect in Google Analytics 4.

GA4 Page Views table

In this post you will learn why the basic page view measurements are far from ideal and how to customize the basic setup for cleaner data and greater insights.

Table of Contents

Enhanced measurement and page views, basic reports on page performance, advanced report on page performance, content groups, concluding thoughts.

Let’s dive right in!

Enhanced Measurement in Google Analytics 4 allows you to measure certain events automatically as you can see in the list below.

GA4 Enhanced Measurement Page Views

Page views are captured when a page loads or when specific browser-history events occur (when you select the second box). This browser-history event option listens for pushState, popState, and replaceState.

Make sure to always test your implementation properly, especially when you deal with Single Page Applications (SPAs).

Ok, this is good to know. But what data is sent to your Google Analytics 4 property ? Google’s support document mentions two parameters that relate to the “page_view” event:

  • page_location = URL, including http(s) and all query parameters .
  • page_referrer = previous page URL

GA4 page_view event

A different support page, Automatically collected events , lists “page_title” as another parameter that GA4 captures.

One report card in the “Real-Time” reporting section confirms this:

GA4 - page_title - parameter

And the Page Title is what GA4 uses by default in the reports.

GA4 Reports AND Page Title

The “page_location” isn’t very readable and there is a challenge with the “Page Path” dimension as well!

The GA4 Dimension and Metrics explorer lists the dimension that is currently available in the reporting interface.

GA4 Page Path + query string

You can imagine how challenging this is when you run a(n) (Ecommerce) site with tons of query parameters.

No worries, let me show you what Google Analytics 4 page view reports are available out-of-the-box and what steps to take to enhance your reporting.

In the GA4 reporting interface you have two options when it comes to Pages and Page Views reporting:

  • Pages and screens: Page title and screen class
  • Pages and screens: Page path + query string and screen class

Let me show (again) that both reports are far from ideal.

Page title and screen class

GA4 Pages and screens - Page title and screen class

  • Page level data is hard to analyze when Page Titles are not accurately set.
  • It’s also very hard to group certain pages into larger groups.

Page path + query string and screen class

GA4 Pages and screens - Page path + query string and screen class

  • Query parameters create duplicate versions of pages in GA4.
  • For example, roughly 80% of all Google Analytics Demo Store pages contain at least one query parameter.

In my opinion, both options are far from ideal when analyzing page level data in GA4.

The third, basic option that you have is to use the “Explore” functionality and use Page Location = page_location.

GA4 Explore Page Location

Not a lot better I think. The full URL is shown and it includes technical query parameters you most probably want to strip from the URL!

GA4 currently has no option to filter out query parameters via the Reporting View settings (no Views structure ) or Admin filters .

Is there a better solution? Of course, otherwise I wouldn’t take the time to write this blog post. :-)

  • Modify the GA4 implementation and configuration tag in GTM.
  • Register the “clean” Page Path parameter as a custom dimension in GA4.
  • Watch the data flow or use Real Time debugging.

Step 1 : modify the basic GA4 Configuration Tag in GTM.

GA4 - add Page Path dimension in GTM

  • “path_clean” is an extra parameter pulled in via the built-in GTM variable {{Page Path}}.
  • You can change the “Field Name” to what suits you and your naming conventions best.

Step 2 : register the parameter as a custom dimension in GA4.

  • Go to  Configure > Custom definitions .
  • Click on “Custom dimensions” and then “Create custom dimensions”.
  • Fill in the information based on your GTM setup.

Here is how it looks like on my end:

GA4 clean_path parameter

Note : you won’t be able to use your data in the Advanced Reporting section (Explore) if you don’t register the new parameter.

Step 3 : watch the data flow or use Real Time debugging.

Here I use GTM preview & debug with the following URL: https://online-metrics.com/ ?gtm_debug=1634736396812 .

The red part of the URL is not visible in GA4 which confirms it works!

GA4 path_clean parameter test

You can also validate it via the “Explore” section in Google Analytics 4.

GA4 Explore path_clean

Now you know how to analyze page view data via the following sections/parameters:

  • page_location
  • Page Path with query parameters
  • Page Path without query parameters

There is one more option that I will quickly touch upon in the next section.

Here you can find an extensive post on Content Grouping in Universal Analytics .

At the time of writing, there is no clear documentation on Content Groups in Google Analytics 4. Also, the Google Merchandise Demo Store doesn’t store this data.

GA4 content group demo account

Here you can see the dimension value is (not set):

GA4 demo account content group = (not set)

However, it is possible to set this up via Google Tag Manager. I have experimented with it for quite a while and it turns out that you need to set one field to “content_group” and you can pass the data (dynamically).

GA4 OM content group GTM

GA4 data in reporting interface

GA4 OM content group interface

In a future blogpost I will share more on content groups in GA4, but this should get your started! Last note, currently you can only set up one content group in GA4.

Google Analytics 4 can be a great tool to extract more insights from your data, but only if set up properly.

Making sense of page performance is key on any website so make sure to review the out-of-the-box implementation and make adjustments where needed.

I highly recommend capturing a “clean” Page Path dimension at a minimum as it is not (yet) available by default. In addition, think about mapping your (most important) content group(s) in GA4.

Also, I expect more out-of-the-box options to become available in the future.

Now it’s your turn! Do you have any thoughts on pages, page views and related measurements in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?

Reader Interactions

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February 28, 2022 at 7:34 pm

Hi Paul, I have a question and hopefully you can help. When I look at the pages and screen report, I see (other) is one of values in the page path dimension. This is weird. The total pageview in the last three days is about 500,000. (other) took up 96,000. Do you have any idea why there’s (other) in the report and why is that? Thanks, Grace

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March 1, 2022 at 2:03 pm

Hi Grace, Please see these two articles: [GA4] (other) entries in reports [GA4] Row limits

This will help you understand what’s going on.

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April 20, 2022 at 5:34 am

Hi Paul, 2 quick questions: 1. why is my GA pageviews different to GA4 pageviews? same page, same month but different numbers. 2. I recently try to find the number of pageviews a page on my site had in GA4 in Jan and Feb there were results but now for March / April there is no data available. Why would that be? cheers

April 20, 2022 at 12:06 pm

Hi Juzz, Please see my answers below: 1. Pageviews will never be exactly the same, but overall you shouldn’t see a very big gap. Read more here . 2. Did you test if the GA4 tracking still fires on that page? And do you still see the same amount of traffic in UA/GA3?

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April 27, 2022 at 9:03 pm

In GA3, there is a 75,000-page limit, and anything over that gets reported as “other.” Not that we have 75K pages, but they see every page with URL parameters as a separate page. Therefore, every search is now a new page with the URL parameter.

In GA3, I can modify the page and remove the URL parameters – which helps.

With GA4, do you know if there is still a 75K limit on the page? Is the system recognizing the page from the URL parameter? The reports I have seen still recognize the URL parameter as part of the page. Therefore, page1 and page1&q=test are different pages when they should roll up as Page1.

I contemplated hijacking the page_location to be just to the page name, then capturing the URL string separately in a custom parameter. HOWEVER, I have learned the hard way before that changing the Google data collection can adversely affect reports.

What are your thoughts, will changing the page_location to the true page without URL parmaters have adverse efets in the reporting? Obviously Google wont reconise the additional custom parameters that I would add to track this.

April 28, 2022 at 2:34 pm

Hi William,

GA3/Universal Analytics and GA4 work differently in that respect. I recommend reading these two Twitter threads: – GA4 cardinality (1) – GA4 cardinality (2)

I recommend adding an extra parameter to the page_view event capturing the {{Page Path}} without query parameters AND consider stripping the query parameter from the main page URL if you are concerned about cardinality

Cardinality could be an issue at a much broader scope, but that’s something I might discuss in a future post.

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April 28, 2022 at 8:46 am

Landing pages are not showing in real time of google analytics. I have just added the GA4 code to the website, so in the real time view of the analytics section, the user is showing but the landing page is not showing.

That’s correct, you don’t find a landing page dimension in that report.

If correctly implemented, you should see “Views by Page title and screen name” though.

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May 12, 2022 at 11:51 am

Is there any way to view unique page views in GA4? I’ve been trying to find a way to get that data as I don’t want repeat views to bump up the numbers.

May 12, 2022 at 2:06 pm

On default, the GA4 UI can show “Views” and “Views per Session” in the Pages and screens report. The “Sessions” metrics comes close to “Unique Views” (if you measure Web). You can add it (if you have Edit rights) via the “Customize Report” link in the top right corner of the report. Under “Customise report” click on Metrics and then Add Metric. Last step is to select Sessions, apply and save the changes. Be aware that this will change the setup of the report for all users (if you modify the current report).

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May 20, 2022 at 6:00 am

Hi, Really informative I have one doubt that if we want to track unique page view how can we do that.

May 20, 2022 at 10:11 am

Unique page views are tracked, but currently not displayed as a metric (similar to UA). On default, the GA4 UI can show “Views” and “Views per Session” in the Pages/screens report. The “Sessions” metrics comes close to “Unique Views” (if you measure Web). You can add it (if you have Edit rights) via the “Customize Report” link in the top right corner of the report. Under “Customise report” click on Metrics and then Add Metric. Last step is to select Sessions, apply and save the changes. A quick heads up that if you modify the current report, it will modify it for all users that have access to the report. Another option would be to create a separate report with this metric in the Explore section of GA4.

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September 20, 2022 at 9:31 pm

Hi Paul, My mind is blown that GA4 has removed Unique Pageviews. Those are what actually matter. If a person refreshes a page 3 times and converts down the funnel, the conversion rate will be 1/3 using their “Views”. But with Unique Pageviews or Unique Views (or a Session that saw a specific page) the conversion rate would be 1/1. We don’t want to count multiple views of the same page, or refreshes. So, to get around this massive oversight, I’m trying to create custom funnels within the Explorations section and I want to count Sessions that saw page x, that had a conversion. Do you know how to do this? It appears they have made that either extremely difficult or impossible as well. I basically need “of all total sessions that saw page x, how many of those sessions had a conversion event” Thanks for your content and any insight you can provide to this common problem. Cheers.

September 21, 2022 at 2:43 am

I think I may have figured it out. If you create a session-based segment and apply it, such as Device Type, and the steps in your funnel are specific views of certain pages, it will only count one view per session. I think… lol

September 21, 2022 at 2:11 pm

One of the easiest ways to get this done would be to add the “Sessions” metric to a standard report that contains Page Title / Page Path as well as Views and Users. You can customize the standard reports and add/remove metrics and/or dimensions.

I believe this is more easy than creating a funnel report. Please note that the funnel report on default reports on users per step. Here you can read more about funnels in GA4 .

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May 23, 2022 at 9:04 pm

First of all, love the content! Keep it coming. Now for my question: Could I use path_clean in a funnel exploration report? If that so would path_clean be under page_view as a parameter? Example: Step 1 > page_view > clean_path > contains > abc/xya

Or should I use path_clean directly as a dimension in that case?

I hope I’ve made myself clear.

Thanks for the post

May 24, 2022 at 2:41 pm

Hi Eduardo,

Thanks for the heads up!

1) Yes, you can use ‘path_clean’ in funnel exploration reports . 2) In this case, it would yield similar results as ‘path_clean’ is a parameter only fetched with the ‘page_view’ event. As a best practice I would also include ‘page_view’ here as that makes it easier if you later re-visit the funnel to see what you have set up and/or want to modify it. ‘page_view > clean_path > contains > abc/xya’ as a first step looks good to me. It even works if you use an AND statement in step one and first specify the event ‘page_view’ and after AND the parameter ‘path_clean’ (or ‘clean_path’ -> how you named it).

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June 10, 2022 at 12:07 pm

Thanks, this has been helpful to bolster my understanding. I was also quite confused about Content Groups and the lack of documentation. In our Universal Analytics setup, I have one content group using 50+ rule definitions (each being a regex on the page path), but in GA4 it looks like this isn’t possible. I have therefore tried to use GTM instead and use a “RegEx Table” variable that I can link to as a Field in my GA4 Configuration tag, but I’m not sure whether this is best practice.

Interested in whether you have any alternate thoughts… Thanks!

June 20, 2022 at 2:10 pm

Yes, I believe a RegEx and/or Look Up table in combination with the GA4 Configuration tag is a good way to “copy” your described Universal Analytics setup to GA4.

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June 20, 2022 at 6:37 pm

One generic query on GA4 setup, We have recently found out that in one of the client websites the GA4 setup under data stream the URL is without HTTPS but on UA under property setting URL is with HTTPS. So does that mean the data discrepancy between UA & GA4 will be there? Also, does it affect the events or reports too?

June 21, 2022 at 9:38 am

Hi George, Both settings don’t influence the actual data collection so it shouldn’t be the cause of any discrepancies found between UA and GA4.

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June 28, 2022 at 11:39 pm

How would it be possible to segment data on a multisite installation where there is an umbrella company domain with multiple sub directories sitting under that main domain? Each subdirectory is a different division of the main company so it is important to report data for the main domain and individual stats for each subdomain. The structure is similar to this example: http://www.mymaindomain.com http://www.mymaindomain.com/subdirectory1 http://www.mymaindomain.com/subdirectory2 http://www.mymaindomain.com/subdirectory3 In UA I created different views using filters to only show data from each subdirectory and then one unfiltered set of data that acted as a roll up to show overall traffic to the main domain but this is not possible in GA4 as far as I can see. Do you have a method for implementing something such as this please?

June 29, 2022 at 10:00 am

Hi Rob, Unfortunately, GA4 doesn’t current support any filters that would allow to do something like that. In the GA4 UI, there is a comparison feature, but I believe it won’t suit you exact needs here. Also, comparisons will disappear when you re-start another GA4 session. In GA360 (paid version) you could do something here with roll-up reporting , but it will require quite some work to set it up as well as you need to have the paid version of GA4. Also, with segments (in the Explore section) it will be cumbersome to set this up, maintain and analyze the data. And the outcome will be different compared to UA. As a last resort you could try to leverage BigQuery here, BUT this requires advanced skills and goes far beyond this blog. Hopefully a solution for your request will come in the near future.

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July 24, 2022 at 7:57 pm

Hello Paul, thank you for another good post about GA4. In one of your answers above you write: “I recommend adding an extra parameter to the page_view…” I am trying to understand how to achieve this, without success. Could you please point me in some direction? Actually, I would like to add to the page_view event a new “Page title” parameter, which is not the standard tag, but the basic page title, for a better understanding of reports. Thank you. Flavio

July 25, 2022 at 11:55 am

Hi Flavio, Thank you for the heads up: – Please see this part which describes how you can add {{Page Path}} as an extra parameter. – You can fetch the “Page Title” by 1) Creating a JavaScript Variable in GTM with the Global Variable Name “document.title” and then 2) Adding it to your page_view tag (same way as described in the link in my comment).

Hope this helps!

July 25, 2022 at 10:15 pm

Outstanding Paul, thank you so much! You have given me the puzzle piece I was missing :-) My mind was not open enough to think that I should put the extra parameter in the GA4 tracking code event. I was struggling putting it anywhere else, including in a datalayer push, in a template file, or in another custom event called “page_view”, which simply resulted in a double page_view event. As to the page title, I have extracted it through a GTM variable -> DOM element -> CSS selector -> element = h1. Flavio

July 26, 2022 at 9:41 am

Great to hear you have resolved it Flavio! :-)

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September 15, 2022 at 11:25 am

Can this also be used to overwrite the page path?

Situation: Website sells tickets for performances. They use ur’s like: /ticket/performance?id=103124 In Google Analytics those are hard to interpret. So we used virtual pageviews (something like ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’, ‘/ticket/performance/NameOfAwesomeBandRocking); ) to solve that in UA.

But we’re implementing GA4 via GTM now. And need some solution to fix this issue. Can we just push a nice Page Path variable in the Data Layer to overwrite the real Page Path? Or is the only way to use a Custom Dimension ?

September 16, 2022 at 5:00 pm

In general it is recommended to leave the Page Path as it is, but I believe you could potentially overwrite it. But, if you don’t really use the Page Title, you could pass these amended values (i.e. via custom javascript variable) into the ‘page_title’ field. You will have a more user friendly page names for your Pages report AND the pathing functionality becomes more useful.

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November 22, 2022 at 5:25 pm

Hi great article. I tired a solution but still have trouble for pages in the user explorer report in g4. in UA the user explorer report showed exactly what page the user was on each them they switched pages. In the G4 user explore report it only shows page_view and not the actual page they were on. There is no way G4 isn’t showing the page name in user explorer reports right? What I am missing here to expose the page name when I drill down to a single session in the user explore report? Thank you.

November 23, 2022 at 2:57 pm

Hi Ronnie, Yes, you can actually if you pull in an extra custom dimension for the ‘page_view’ event. You can use ‘path_clean’ for example ( suggested in article ). You will find details on the actual page if you click on the ‘page_view’ event and review the Event Parameters (right side). Hope this helps! Paul

November 28, 2022 at 6:19 pm

Thanks so much! It worked. Top notch G4 advice. Thanks again.

November 29, 2022 at 9:02 am

Perfect, great to hear that!

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January 19, 2023 at 5:48 pm

I have scenario like below. The request URIs will be as below msg/conversations/20001, msg/conversations/20002 msg/conversations/20003 etc. For all these types of URIs, I have to show a generic URI msg/conversations/ids.

How can I achieve this ?

January 20, 2023 at 12:12 pm

In that case you could overwrite the ‘page_location’ parameter for these URLs in the GA4 configuration tag. But make sure that the pageviews are sent as expected after you implement this override.

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March 15, 2023 at 9:21 am

Hi there, I have created a report with page path+query string under the life cycle report (Engagement > Page and Screen) that GA4 provides and created a same page path+query string report under exploration (using Free form). I have checked the date range is under the same period.

However, the views in the two reports show a great difference, do u have any idea why there is such a significant difference between them?? (Engagement > Page and Screen = 231786 vs Free Form = 473269)

March 15, 2023 at 11:05 am

Quick question, do you see the same number of unique pages or are the number of unique pages in the Free Form report greater?

March 15, 2023 at 12:50 pm

Free Form unique pages is much greater, so which report should I use to show a more accurate result, thanks!

March 15, 2023 at 2:18 pm

Most probably your standard report is suffering from Cardinality. The free-form is more accurate to use as I expect it contains dimension values with low event/user counts where the standard report isn’t. I will elaborate on Cardinality in a future article.

March 16, 2023 at 2:37 am

OK got it, thank you so much!

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May 19, 2023 at 1:27 pm

Thanks for this – however I came across an issue when i tried to use this method. The page report worked fine, however to see a landing page report using the same values, i filtered pages by session start, however session_start does not fire for custom dimensions. To solve this, I switched the enhanced measurement back on, and instead of using a custom dimension/parameter, overwrote the existing page_location (or page_title) variable with my simplified url in the config tag. This seems to be working fine – but I’m interested if anyone else has come across this issue and solved it another way? Hope this helps

May 19, 2023 at 4:21 pm

Good feedback Richard, haven’t come across this before, but will let you know if I have a useful comment on this!

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June 13, 2023 at 10:58 pm

Hey Paul, I know you have a question answered above about a difference in pageviews between UA and GA4. Currently my GA4 property is showing approx a 10% higher number. Is this normal or is that too much? this number varies from 8% to 12% on various days. FYI, i have no filters setup on either properties and this variation is based on approx 3 million pageviews / day. Additionally, our universal is coded through backend vs our GA4 is coded through GTM. Is 10% a normal difference or should it be less, and if less, what solutions would you recommend to inspect?

June 14, 2023 at 3:56 pm

Hi Kevin, In my experience this is on the high end, but still ok. There can be several reasons why your count in GA4 is higher with one of them the type of implementation (differs between GA4 and UA in your case). Do you see this 10% differences across all (main) website pages? That’s something interesting to evaluate. If, on average it goes over 12 or even 15%, then that’s too high in my opinion.

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Team Canada to visit the Gordie Howe International Bridge, the largest Canada-US infrastructure project

From: Global Affairs Canada

Media advisory

Members of the media are invited for a unique photo opportunity as the Honourable Mary Ng, Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development and the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry as well as Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, visit the largest infrastructure project between Canada and the USA.

Monday, March 4, 2024 – Members of the media are invited for a unique photo opportunity as the Honourable Mary Ng, Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development and the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry as well as Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, visit the largest infrastructure project between Canada and the USA.

The Ministers and the Ambassador will be joined by members of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority (WBDA) to tour this once in-a generation project between Canada and the US.

Date:  Tuesday, March 5, 2024 Time:  2:30 p.m. EST (visit begins at 3 p.m.) Place:  1001 Springwells Court, Detroit MI

Notes for media:

  • Media interested in attending are requested to RSVP at [email protected] by Tuesday March 5th, 10 a.m.
  • Personnel from the WDBA will be onsite to direct media to the appropriate parking area.
  • Some terrain may be uneven which could pose a challenge for those with mobility concerns. Appropriate footwear is encouraged.

Shanti Cosentino Press Secretary Office of the Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development 343-576-4365 [email protected]

Audrey Champoux Press Secretary and Senior Communications Advisor Office of the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry [email protected]

Media Relations Office Global Affairs Canada [email protected]

Follow us on Twitter:  @CanadaTrade Like us on Facebook:  Canada’s international trade - Global Affairs Canada

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  1. Unique Visitors: What It Is and Why You Need To Measure It

    Unique Visitors: The system recognizes the visit's origin - the visitor - over a specified period. Each visitor visiting your site or page within the specified period is counted only once. Let's take a closer look at the methodology Similarweb and Google Analytics uses to identify website unique visitors and collect the information.

  2. Page Views vs. Visits: What's The Difference? We Break It Down

    Understanding Page Views vs. Visits. A page view occurs when a page on your website is loaded or reloaded whether the user was already on your page or came from an external page. A page visit, on the other hand, only occurs when someone lands on your site from an external page, such as Google or another website.

  3. Page Views vs Unique Visitors: What's More Important?

    A unique visitor is an individual user who has accessed your site. It is determined by the IP address of the computer or device that the user is browsing from, combined with a cookie on the browser they are using. No matter how many visits a visitor makes if he is on the same device and the same browser, only one unique visitor is counted.

  4. Page Views vs Visits: What's the Difference (Beginner's Guide)?

    Click To Tweet. Let's quickly recap the distinction between these two metrics: A page view occurs whenever a browser loads your site. Therefore, one visitor can generate many page views. A visit occurs whenever someone arrives at your page from an external source, such as Google search results or another website.

  5. What are unique visitors? Definition

    unique visitors measure the count of distinct individuals visiting a website. total visits represent the overall number of visits (including repeat visits) pageviews track the number of times web pages are viewed. Each metric comes with valuable insights into different facets of website performance, user behavior, or audience engagement.

  6. Unique Visitors in Google Analytics: All You Need To Know

    Google defines unique visitors as the "total number of unique users who logged an event." Back in Universal Analytics (compare UA to GA4 metrics here), the "Total Number of Users" metric was measured as a whole based on unique sessions (users that had at least one session within the selected date range).

  7. Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience

    Unique Website Visitors: Understanding Your Audience. Improve your content marketing + SEO in 60 seconds! Diib uses the power of big data to help you quickly and easily increase your traffic and rankings. We'll even let you know if you already deserve to rank higher for certain keywords. Easy-to-use automated SEO tool.

  8. What Are Unique Visitors and Why Do They Matter?

    Unique visitors are a quite important metric for several reasons. Whether you are looking to monetize your website yourself either by using affiliate marketing or some other monetization options, it goes without saying that you need as many unique visitors as possible. Repeat visitors and customers are obviously also important, but they might ...

  9. How to Find Unique Visitors in Google Analytics

    Open 'Reports'. Click on 'Engagement' under the 'Life cycle' section. Select 'Events' from the drop-down menu. Read the 'Total users' column. The GA4 events report counts 'total users,' which they define as 'the total number of unique users who log an event.'. Image via Google Analytics .

  10. [UA] The difference between Google Ads Clicks, and Sessions, Users

    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 user 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.

  11. What are Google Analytics Page Views? (Complete Guide)

    What are pageviews in Google Analytics? The pageviews metric in Google Analytics shows the total number of pages viewed for a given period of time. A pageview is a view of a page that is being tracked by Google Analytics. A view can be the initial load of a page, a reload or a revisit to the page. This is the official definition given by Google ...

  12. Understanding Basic Visitor Metrics

    Learn about Page Views, Visits, and Visitors in Adobe Analytics. Get definitions of these basic visit metrics and learn about their similarities and differences. Learn the various terms (synonyms or keywords) associated with visitor metrics and Website traffic. View a sample Workspace project that shows how these metrics are displayed in the ...

  13. Unique visits explained

    Unique visits explained. At Simple Analytics we do things a bit differently. We put the privacy of your visitors first. At the same time we comply with strict (and necessary) privacy laws. This has an impact on our statistics, like unique visits. We record page views (which is very easy to do without invading the privacy of your visitors).

  14. What Are Unique Site Visitors? Definition and How to Calculate Them

    Step 3: Click on 'Overview'. This will give you a graph at the top of the page, which shows you the number of users and unique visitors that have come to your site in the last 30 days. Step 4: To get a more accurate insight into the extent of the outreach of your site, you need to calculate the number of unique visitors.

  15. Pageviews vs Unique Pageviews in Google Analytics

    Simply put, unique pageviews combine the pageviews that are from the same person (a user in Google Analytics ), on the same page, in the same session, and just count them as one. Unique pageviews are tracked for each page URL and page title combination. A user could view the same page 15 times, and refresh it multiple times as well—but if all ...

  16. Unique Pageviews vs Pageviews

    A user has visited /page-1 twice in the same session. So for '/page-1', the pageview metrics will simply be 2. Now as per the unique pageviews definition, the number of sessions in which the /page-1 was viewed is one. So you can see 1 unique pageview for /page-1. Similarly, the page-2 and page-3 have 1-1 unique pageviews. Remember…

  17. Sessions vs. Users vs. Pageviews in Google Analytics

    As Bryan Ng of Coup 365 says, "Users are unique, and sessions are how many times a page was being visited. User (Z) can visit your webpage 10 times, and that counts 10 sessions and 1 user. User (Y) visits the same webpage 5 times, and that counts 5 sessions and 1 user. Webpage total: 15 sessions and 2 users.".

  18. What Are Pageviews? How can I increase my site's Pageviews?

    When a user visits a web page once or even multiple times during a specific session, it is counted as a unique pageview. From a Google Analytics point of view, a session usually relates to 24 hours. Here's an example to further illustrate the point: If a user visits page A, navigates to page B and then back to page A, each instance would be ...

  19. What is Page Views: In-Depth Analysis vs Visits Comparison

    Page Visits, also known as sessions, refer to a series of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. A single Page Visit can encompass multiple Page Views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions. A session begins when a user lands on your website and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at ...

  20. Page Views vs Visits: What's the Difference?

    "Unique" page views, refer to the number of different pages a given visitor viewed during a session. In practice, this means that if a single visitor refreshed a single page three times during a thirty-minute period, Google Analytics will log three page views and one unique page view. Visits and Sessions

  21. Pageviews vs Unique Pageviews vs Sessions vs Visitors: What's the

    Pageviews vs Visits. Pageviews are the number of times each specific page is viewed on your site, whereas visits are the number of sessions for each unique user. If the same user visits your website twice in one day, they would have had two separate sessions.

  22. Advanced Guide to Page View Tracking in Google Analytics 4

    You can change the "Field Name" to what suits you and your naming conventions best. Step 2: register the parameter as a custom dimension in GA4. Go to Configure > Custom definitions. Click on "Custom dimensions" and then "Create custom dimensions". Fill in the information based on your GTM setup.

  23. Page Views vs. Visits: What's the Difference?

    Any page the user visits or any activity they complete within one session counts as one unique visit. However, if that same person accesses your website over 30 minutes later, it counts as a new session. Sessions do not track what web pages the viewer visits, only how many people engage in a browsing session and how long each session lasts.

  24. Why is the 2024 total solar eclipse so unique?

    On April 8, the moon will "totally" block the sun, leaving the sun's outermost layer, the corona, visible to the naked eye — like a glowing ring in the sky. But there's another factor ...

  25. Team Canada to visit the Gordie Howe International Bridge, the largest

    Monday, March 4, 2024 - Members of the media are invited for a unique photo opportunity as the Honourable Mary Ng, Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade and Economic Development and the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry as well as Canada's Ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, visit the largest infrastructure ...