visits, visitors, pageviews, uniquepageviews...

[Johan Myrberger]

I'm struggling with the usage of these (visits, visitors, pageviews, uniquepageviews) metrics, when used together with a filter.

I'm trying to grab the stats for a subpart of my site, using:
metrics: visits&visitors&pageviews&uniquePageviews (just to get them all and compare...)
filter: pagePath=@/xxx/yyy/zzz/ (to get all pages that includes this path)
dimensions: pagePath (to see the result per page)

What I get back:

ga:pagePath ga:visits ga:visitors ga:pageviews ga:uniquePageviews
/xxx/yyy/zzz/ 124 1518 2526 1702
/xxx/yyy/zzz/page1/ 143 238 203 198
/xxx/yyy/zzz/page2/ 59 153 188 158
/xxx/yyy/zzz/page3/ 24 54 54 39
/xxx/yyy/zzz/page4/ 34 94 129 104
/xxx/yyy/zzz/page5/ 104 243 248 233

Now:
* I understand that "visits" is not a good metric to use together with a filter - right?
* "uniquePageviews" filters out multiple pageviews within the same session - right?

But:
* I would still expect the number of pageviews (and even the number of uniquePageviews) to be larger than the number of visitors (which is not the case eg for page1)

Any ideas? Also, any pointer to a good summary of how these metrics relates to each other and how they are measured..?

Thanks!

[Nick]

Hi.

Say a visitor, visits a site and views a bunch of pages.

In GA each of these are explicit levels and we call them visitors, sessions and hit levels respectively.  

ga:visits is incremented in the first hit of a session.

ga:visitors (in the way defined above) is incremented every time we see a unique visitor ID.

ga:pageviews is incremented for every page type of hit (ie called from _trackPageview)

ga:uniquePageviews is incremented once per session for every combination of pagePath and pageTitle 

So visitor X sees these sequence of pages (tracked via _trackPageview) in the same session:

visitor id is constant and so is the session id.

pagePath=Page1,title=foo

pagePath=Page2,title=bar

pagePath=Page3,title=baz

pagePath=Page1,title=joe

Here's the expected output:

ga:pagePath ga:visits ga:visitors ga:pageviews ga:uniquePageviews

Page1       1         1           1            2

Page2       0         1           1            1

Page3       0         1           1            1

-Nick

[Johan Myrberger]

Thanks Nick,

Great summary of the metrics parameters (would be good to have this in a FAQ perhaps?)

This more or less confirms my assumptions under "Now" in my original post:
- Visits will depend on the entry page, and thus might be less (filtered out) if you look at a subset of your site.
- uniquepageviews will in general be less than pageviews..

However..:
Based on your explanation I'd still expect the number of pageviews (as well as uniquePageviews) to be at least as large as number of visitors (for each pagePath). (my "But" above..) Can you see a scenario where this would not be the case?

[Nick]

Yes, one of our goals is to document these, just we need to do some data model clean up (like one campaign per session) before we're ready.

Anyways per your comments:

On Tuesday, August 23, 2011 1:28:11 AM UTC-7, Johan Myrberger wrote:

Thanks Nick,

Great summary of the metrics parameters (would be good to have this in a FAQ perhaps?)

This more or less confirms my assumptions under "Now" in my original post:
- Visits will depend on the entry page, and thus might be less (filtered out) if you look at a subset of your site.

technically entry hit. You can have a visit be attributed to an event or social interaction if they are tracked before a pageview.

 

- uniquepageviews will in general be less than pageviews..

generally yes

 

However..:
Based on your explanation I'd still expect the number of pageviews (as well as uniquePageviews) to be at least as large as number of visitors (for each pagePath). (my "But" above..) Can you see a scenario where this would not be the case?

so it's a bit more complicated. Do you use event tracking? Do you use virtual URLs in your _trackPagview methods? The pagePath value is stored both for events, social tracking and page tracking, yet you can only set the value for the last two types of hits.

So if you use virtual pageviews and events, you could be getting visitors to the page, but no page views.

-Nick