Unique Visitor segment

[fern1]

Hi!

Ive another 101 question!
I need the number of unique visitors from the summation of 3 pages. However, we do not have calculated metrics on our AA, and I know we cannot add the unique visitors from each of those pages as we might duplicate unique visitors.

Therefore, I thought about creating a segment, but I'm not sure if the way I'm thinking works:

so from Hit I switched to visitor, 

and in the page name, it is included the page name of the 3 pages I want to know the unique visitors as a sum, and charged to equal their page names. Would that result??

thanks in advance

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

You shouldn't need a Visitor segment... Hit level, if Page Name equals 1, 2 or 3....

Then you can just pair the segment with the UVs metric.....

There won't be any over counting / duplicated UV counts.... Workspace will de-duplicate these at the total level... 

You would have a problem if you create three different segments, one for page 1, one for page 2 and one for page 3, and used those as your breakdowns...

When you have segments in the left column, the total does a complete "sum" of the segments rather than de-duplicating.... 

147,830 + 69,929 + 60,346 clearly sums to more than the total shown here: 200,091 proving that the UVs are de-duplicated

However, if you were to do this:

With three separate Segments, then the total is not de-duplicated (i.e. 278,105)

Neither using Visitor level segment, or using calculated metrics will fix that....

[fern1]

Thank you for the explanation Jen!
Just another question, why in the segment you use Hit instead of Visitor?

thank you

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You are trying to get the number of UVs that hit three specific pages... Visitor segments return every page and every visit for visitors that hit those three pages. 

Technically if you only ever look at UV as your metric, using Visitor would work... but if someone asks you to look at the combined PVs for those pages. the segment built using "Visitor" as a scope would be super inflated.

Unless you absolutely need to use a Visitor Scope segment, I always instruct people to stick with the most simple segment that will achieve their needs... if they don't fully understand the potential to inflate data then 9 times out of 10, they will pair it with something that will cause problems with their reporting.

Your needs are simple... the "key" to what you are pulling is pages, pages are hits. Page A, Page B OR Page C... there is no need to complicate matters by changing the scope.

[fern1]

That makes sense!

thank you so much for explaining it!