When will Unique Visitors metric be available via the API?

[surfimp]

I'm wondering if/when the Unique Visitors metric will be available via
the API?

The reason I ask is that, for whatever reason, the Visits data I'm
getting is unreliable when viewed at the level of a specific page
(i.e. pagePath), regardless of whether I get the data via the web
interface or the API. I end up with stats like:

page.html 76 pageviews 1 visit 68 unique visitors

Obviously there's more than "1 visit" to the page... I'm guessing the
unique visitors stat is the one that best approximates reality, but
unfortunately it's not yet available via the API... hence my question/
request.

Per a reply by Nick back in Nov. 09, it sounds like I'll need to get
this data via email export and then parse it offline. Is that still
the best/only solution to this situation?

Thanks in advance.

[Brandt Dainow]

Actually, it is available in the API as "visitors." If you're getting
more total visitors than total visits in the reporting system,
something's wrong with your site or your tracking code. Using the API
won't help - it'll show exactly the same data. However, the valid
metrics combinations data specifically says you cannot combine
pagePath with visitors - it's not a legal combination, neither can you
see them combined in the reports. This is (I guess) because GA is not
recording click-stream data (ie: it does not keep a track of each
visitor's history). It is only counting how many different views of a
page there were, and how many different cookies it was recorded on
(unique page views). In other words, GA cannot tell you how many
PEOPLE looked at an individual page.

[roji]

Hi.

I also need this exact feature, and my tests show something slightly
different...

Trying to have pagePath as a dimension and visitors as a metric throws
an exception when using the API, like you say. However, the custom
reports on the GA web interface provide a "uniqueVisitors" field
(distinct from "visitors" that *can* be combined with pagePath, and
works perfectly.

Without going into the implementation behind the scenes, it would seem
that the API is lagging behind the GA web interface, too bad...

Shay

[surfimp]

On Jun 23, 9:50 am, roji <rojan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I also need this exact feature, and my tests show something slightly
> different...
>
> Trying to have pagePath as a dimension and visitors as a metric throws
> an exception when using the API, like you say. However, the custom
> reports on the GA web interface provide a "uniqueVisitors" field
> (distinct from "visitors" that *can* be combined with pagePath, and
> works perfectly.
>
> Without going into the implementation behind the scenes, it would seem
> that the API is lagging behind the GA web interface, too bad...

Thanks Shay, you're spot on in understanding what I was getting at in
my request. There are three metrics in the GA web interface, Visits,
Visitors and Unique Visitors (the last available only in custom
reporting from what I've seen).

Per the Google documentation, Visitors simply indicates the total
number of visitors sessions to your site over a given time period, and
as such cannot be combined with anything except certain specified time-
based metrics. Visits can indicate aggregated visit traffic for a
page but is not a reliable indicator of *unique* visitor traffic, and
as noted in my request, apparently has problems in my implementation
(could be related to the employment of Events tracking and/or
Ecommerce, not really sure to be honest).

In any event, as noted, it seems the Unique Visitors metric will give
me at least a reasonable estimation of the number of unique human
visits to a given pagePath... hence my request. In the meantime I'm
exporting the report via a scheduled email and will parse it offline.
Oh the joy... ;-)

Steve

[Mark Garner]

I'd like this feature too.

[Nick]

Well I'd like it too. It's just taking a long time to get it :(

-Nick

[surfimp]

Still waiting on this on our side, too. Looks like there's a gdata-
issues request for the item, maybe if we all add a star to it, it will
happen sooner than later?

http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=2052&colspec=API%20ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Stars%20Summary

Regards,

Steve