ga:pagePath and ga:visitors / ga:visits: Why can ga:visitors be higher than ga:visits?

[Mario Colombo]

Hi,

assuming that there is a 1:n relation between visitors and visits I would guess that for any given page in ga:pagePath there would be at least as many visits as visitors.

However with the following settings most pages return more visits than visitors!

Dimensions: ga:pagePath

Metrics: ga:visitors,ga:visits

Filter: ga:pagePath=~comparison

Start Date: 2012-12-01

End Date: 2013-09-06

Max-Results: 50

One example:

/path/to/page  ga:visitors: 4378 ga:visits: 327

How can that be?

All the best and many thanks for your inputs

Mario

[Nick Mihailovski]

Visits are incremented on the first hit of a session. With pages they count landing pages.

UniquePageviews are incremented for the page 1 time in a session.

I think you are looking for unique page views.

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[Aaron Toledo]

+1 to Nick's answer. 

For the dimension pagepath, visits will be the number of times a visit started on that page (which is still slightly different from entrances), pageviews are total pageviews for the page regardless of of sequence viewed, unique pageviews are deduped per  session with a maximum unique pageview per page equal to total visits in that timeframe, and visitors are unique visitors who saw that page with a maximum value per page equal to total visitors in the timeframe.

If you export this to excel, be careful not to add up all the visitors for each page because you'll end up with a total visitor number that is higher than actual visitors that came to your site!