Visits vs. Unique visitors

[mennos58292664]

Hi,

I have trouble fully understanding how everything is calculated. I will give an example

Time period: 2017

                         Visits  100.000     Unique visitors 60.000

Visit number 1              50.000                              50.000

Visit number 2              10.000                              10.000

Visit number 3                7.000                                7.000

..........

Visit number 500                   1                                       1

In the end, I'm pretty sure visits will line up to be 100%, but unique visitors go way above 100%

In my understanding, a visit resets every 30 minutes, however unique visitors stay for a long time (years). If a unique visitor comes back after these 30 minutes, what does reset? Will the visit number start at 1 again, or will it continue?

Also the time period is important, I think Visits are for the given time period, while unique visitors are also from before the time period?

What i also want to understand is why do unique visitors have visit numbers 2, 3 ..... 500 (e.g.), I thought a unique visitor is only counted once, so if he visits more pages this won't be counted and therefore the visit numbers 2 and up should be very low?

How do I use the data, should I just not compare unique visitors with visit number? And only use unique visitors as an estimation of the amount of people on my website, but use visits for further analysis.

Thanks in advance.

[Urs_Boller · Accepted solution]

Hi mennos58292664​

the reason is that each visit has exactly 1 visit number (so total is really the sum of the rows).

But each unique visitor can have 1 or more visits (with the according number), that means it will show up on all lines if he matches the criteria. in other words, the total for unique visitors is de-dublicated.

see here: Sum total unique visitors not correct