Cookies, Visits, Unique Visitors

[H_L]

Hello All,

Could you please help to clarify the relations among: cookies, visits, Unique visitors?

I got a little confused.

Under a sub-domain, I got total 3,000 visits in total, about 800 cookies.

But when I export data from Data Warehouse, by: Cookies, Visits, then adds all "visits" from all 800 cookies, I got over 4000 visits.

This means to me that, 1 visits to the site could be split to 2 cookies.

So I am confused.

Please help to share your ideas.

Thank you.

H

[Gigazelle · Accepted solution]

Cookies is not a default metric, so I can't provide an explanation on that one. The cookies metric is whatever your implementation has defined it to me.

Visits and Unique Visitors can easily be explained. Visits are the number of sessions a user has, while unique visitors are the number of unique people that visit your site. A single unique visitor can have multiple visits if they return to your site multiple times.