What is the difference between 'Path Views' on a flow visualisation and Visits/Visitors on a freeform table?

[Huntp]

For my page dimension I have an overview on a freeform table which shows my most popular pages by visits, unique visitors and entries. For the same time period I have a flow visualisation focusing on the journey from my primary page (Page A) to a subpage (Page B)

On the freeform table Page A has 7,088 visits and 6,150 unique visitors and 5,516 entries. On the flow visualisation this same page has 7,747 Path Views when the container flow is set to 'Visitor' and 8,103 path views when set to 'Visit'. Similarly the entries to the page on the flow differ greatly from what's on the freeform table. I don't understand why this would be.

Basically I want to be able to give consistent data as my business area needs an overview snapshot of the visits to it's pages but we also want to find out where these visits are going on a particular journey towards conversion.

Any dumbed down advice would be amazing. I'm not new to analytics but I am new to Adobe Analytics.

[PratheepArunRaj]

Dear Huntp,

Kindly check if the post helps: https://terrynwinter.com/adobe-analytics-understanding-workspace-flow-visualization/

There is still discussion going to understand whether Path Views to be referred to as Occurrences or Instances however for Page Name Dimension, Occurrences = Instances, so go for it without a second thought.

Thanks, Arun.

[jantzen_b]

Do any of the answers below answer your initial question? If so, can you select one of them as the correct answer? If none of the answers already provided answer your question, can you provide additional information to better help the community solve your question?

[Pankaj_Sabharwal · Accepted solution]

Path views correspond to instances in the flow visualizations and instances basically refer to the number of times a given variable was defined in an image request that includes both page view and non page view server calls.

Visits/Visitors is defined as the number of visits divided by the unique visitors on a particular day. Visits are the number of sessions across all the visitors on a day and a unique visitor is the one who has generated several visits on the same day.