API Core report - How do you measure unique visitors

[David Honan]

Morning from 5 degrees C snow now melted Wetherby UK..

In the Google API core report is there a Metric for Unique visitors? So far I can only find ga:visits for ga:uniquepageviews but nothing for unique vistors as illustrated here:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/metric-for-unique_zps99b4d40b.jpg

Any insights welcome :-)

[Andrew]

ga:visitors is the unique visitors metric for the given time period through the API.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/dimsmets#cats=visitor

[David Honan]

Thanks Andrew :-)

[Nick Blexrud]

Andrew - I'm wondering if Google changed this again. According to Google Developer, ga:visits are now defined as "Total number of visitors to your property for the requested time period." 

I'm getting the total number of visits for the given time period, not the unique visitor # that I see in GA.

Thoughts on how to calculate the unique visits?

Thanks

[Nick Blexrud]

Note to self: ga:visits and ga:visitors are two different metrics... :)

[Andrew]

Yeah they're tricky with that. It would be great if ga:visitors was just ga:uniqueVisitors similar to how they have ga:uniquePageviews.

[Alan Hawkins]

Hi, I am still confused by this. I use ga:visitors and get a different figure for the same period set up in Analytics for unique visitors. Am I missing something here?

[Nicholas Blexrud]

Hey Alan - try plugging in your id, metric (ga:visitors) and start/end date into http://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/explorer/. Let me know if the figures are different. Any other info you could provide would be helpful too.

- Nick

[Aaron Toledo]

The "uniqueness" of a visitor depends on the dimensions requested with the metric. For example, if you request "ga:year,ga:month,ga:day" for March 1-31, 2013...you are actually getting "daily unique visitors". You cannot simply add up 31 individual days of "daily unique visitors for each day of March 2013" to get "monthly unique visitors for the month of March". Instead, you would request "ga:year,ga:month" with the same date range to accomplish "monthly unique visitors for the month of march 2013". If sampling isn't triggered, it should match the web interface for Google Analytics for the same date range.