Understanding Visits versus Visitors

When you log into Google Analytics and many other analytic tools you often see in the reports two headings that many people find confusing. One is labeled: “Visits” and the other is labeled: “Visitors”, and the numbers never seem to match. That is because  “Visits” is actually counting “sessions”, while “Visitors” is counting website visitors.

For example:  A visitor could come back several times and each time they return it is counted as a new session (or visit), but it is still only “one” visitor (if they allow cookies from the website).

When you look at visitors it is best to look at “Unique Visitors”, which removes repeat visitors. Although this is not totally accurate because some people (like me) do not store cookies for long periods of time, it is still a good web barometer to use. (My cookies and history are automatically removed whenever I close my browser. But for most people they use the browser’s default settings which allow websites to store cookies on the computer for tracking purposes.)

Watching visits and visitors over time can help you gauge whether you are increasing traffic but you still need to additional web metrics to really understand if the right outcomes are being achieved by your website. For instance, drilling this down to the page level will give you more useful information about which pages are being viewed the most often. Adding the bounce rate to this report can be very eye-opening and give you some insights into customer behavior.

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