Excluding returning visitors on different days

[Max_kinden]

Hello,

This is my first post on these forums... so go easy on me.

Here's the scenario..... I am trying to calculate the cumulative unique visitors hitting a certain page. My setup is as follows...

- Free form table

- Day down the left hand side (in this example lets assume it's 01/03-07/03)

- Unique visitors visiting page X segment along the top

The problem I am running into is that I am double counting visitors when it is split out by day due to their being some visitors that visit the page on different days. So my number is much larger than if I just count how many visitors visit the page between 01/03-07/03.

Has anyone found a way in which I can not count returning visitors when splitting by day? I.e. Only see visitors that I have not already counted on a previous day.

Thanks,

Max

[nickh86417692 · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the forum Max!

Though this would seem like a pretty easy question... the solution isn't so much

You need to build a segment that shows the first hit for that page for the selected time period, but excludes all sequential hits. This is what it will look like. Notice that the exclude segment only excludes after the sequence (red circle). And instead of "contains home" you'll probably want to do "equals (your page)".

Once you have this segment in place, you should be able to break down unique visitors to your chosen page by day and the total unique visitors should sum up to the total.

[Max_kinden]

Hi Lil,

Fantastic... this works a treat!

Is there a way to create such a segment for all unique visitors irrespective of what they saw? I attempted to create something very similar and just say that the page 'exists'... but unfortunately it doesn't seem to capture all the visitors (it's about 0.6% out.. whereas when looking at a specific page it was spot on). Could it suggest that my our implementation has some visitors coming to the site but not recording a page hit?

Thanks,

Max

UPDATED: I managed to solve it using 'Visits = exists' instead of relying on page.

[andrewz_webmd]

I must be doing something wrong. I recreated the segment above and it returns nothing.

Are all the containers and the segment itself set to "hit" ? 

[nickh86417692]

Unfortunately, I haven't come up with a segment that you can apply to any page and have it work without first specifically identifying that page in the segment.

If you use your method of "page exists" that will only capture the first page of their first visit during your specified timeframe. So that segment will work if you're pulling unique visitors sitewide, but if you're pulling reports by page, and that first page view isn't on the specific page that you are looking at, then it won't show up in your report.

[Max_kinden]

Understood.

The second stage of using these segments is for me to integrate it with the 'Target experiences' dimension and thus give me an evolving uplift day by day. But I run into problems because, I suspect it's the same reason you have to specify the page in the segment and cannot create one which will work site-wide!