when I look in Google analytics under visitors overview there is a line chart that tell me how many users per day I have had. But these numbers does not add up to the ones below that show users, new users, sessions and so on. What does the line chart actually tell me? If I for example export the report to an excel file by day I get a lot higher number of users per day compared to exporting by month which is much lower. Can someone explain the difference. I wanted to know the number of visits to the site per day....
While the trend tells you how many individual users visited the site per day, the "Users" below represents you the de-duplicated count of users who came to the site during the time frame applied.
Example: you visit the same site on 4 separate days during a particular week, the line chart will identify you as a visitor on all 4 days (4 daily users). While the User count below counts you an "one" user for the week.
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I am not a Google Analytics power user, but something tells me that if I wanted to parse out the "What pages do your users visit?" box:
It should be a lot easier to do it by individual day than manually clicking through "Today", "Yesterday", then selecting individual calendar dates using "Custom". Unfortunately, if I click on the "PAGES REPORT" option and select the date range I'd like to explore in full (e.g., previous year or more), I can't see on what days what page was visited because the results are all binned together per page visited per date range, with no indication of the specific individual days that it was visited:
Is there a programmatic way (e.g., using an API) to cleanly query and parse Google Analytics "What pages do your users visit?" results to obtain day-by-day info without needing to select today, yesterday, the day before, etc. manually by hand hundreds of times?
The only relevant post I could find on this was: Get a result for each day, instead of total in date range, with Google Analytics API (but it wasn't particularly helpful to me)
You have to select a date range and select Date as secondary dimension, so you can see pages visited in each day without doing it one day at a time.
Chart from Google Analytics
As I worked on my sites monthly report for visits/trends, I noticed that the user number provided in text (value 4539) is different the the number you get when you add each day's plot point together along the blue line (value of 5110). I have the graph set for users, and also made sure the time frame for data was the same, but I am not sure what why these numbers differ so much.
Can someone explain this to me? Apparently I am an idiot.
Edit #1: This is the default settings under Reports > Audience > Overview. I have no dimensions added or anything more than just the strictly default settings.
User numbers are time dependent. That is to say, a user may come back more than once in a month, and GA knows that because it's detecting the cookie dropped in their browser. So, if Person A visited your site on Monday he counts as one user, and a report for Monday counts him as that. If he comes back on Tuesday and you look at a user report just for Tuesday, he is again one user. So, in individual daily reports Person A is counted as one user, in 2 reports. If you look at a report for the week, he counts as one user, because GA knows that he was person coming back to your site twice in one week.
I'm trying to get all unique visitors for a selected time period, but I want to filter them by date on the server. However, the sum of unique visitors for each day isn't the number of unique visitors for the time period.
For example:
Monday: 2 unique visitors
Tuesday: 3 unique visitors
The unique visitors for the two days period isn't necessarily 5.
Is there a way to get the results I want using the Google Analytics API (v3)?
You're right that Users aren't additive, so you can't simply add them day by day. There are several ways around this.
The fist and most obvious is that if you've implemented the User-ID you should be able to straight up pull and interrogate the data about which users saw your site on which days.
Another way I've implemented before is to dynamically pull the number of Users from the Google Analytics API whenever you need it. Obviously this only works if you're populating a live web dashboard or similar, but since it's just the one figure you're asking for, it wouldn't slow down the load time by much. Eg. if you're using a dashboarding tool such as Klipfolio, you may be able to define a dynamic data source, and query Google whenever you needthe figure (https://support.klipfolio.com/hc/en-us/articles/216183237-BETA-Working-with-dynamic-data-sources)
You could also limit the number of ways that the data can be interrogated, and calculate all of them. For example, if you only allow users to look at data month-by-month or day-by-day, then you only need those figures.
Finally, you can estimate the figure with reasonable accuracy by splitting it into two parts. New Users are equal to New Sessions (you're only new on your first Session), which is additive, so that figure can be separated out and combined as required.
Then, you could take a rough ratio of new to returning Users (% New Users) from, say, 1 year of data, and use that with the New Users figure to generate an average on any level.
Can someone explain me the difference between the 2 APP metrics, Active Users and Retained Users. I am looking at these metrics through flurry API and I am grouping my data at month level.
I am not able to understand what is my Retained users number mean at a month level.
Retained users plots two lines. The blue line is the number of users who installed the app in a given month, week or year. The green line identifies how many of these users had at least one session with your app in the past week.
The two lines will generally converge for the current month so use weekly or daily views to analyze the current month.
GA Unique Visitors data isn't making sense to me. From the GA FAQ we get the following definition for 'Visits vs. Visitors'
"The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors. "
The part that I can't resolve with the GA graph is "Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors". For the graph below covering a 30-day period, I would understand the GA definition to mean that the data represents uniqueness across all 30 days, right? But if you look at the screen shot below, you see a regular pattern for each week over the 30-day period the report covers. From that, it seems the numbers we are seeing associated with each of the days of the graph (e.g. 3.92% (4142) for Tuesday, September 8) is a count of unique visitors just in the context of that one day - i.e. without correlating their uniqueness to the rest of the days in the 30-day period. If the graph actually showed uniqueness across the 30-day period, I would expect the daily numbers to start high in the early days of the period and decrease over the 30-day period as the number of already-seen visitors (i.e. returning visitors) increases, no?
What am I missing here?
UPDATE
Helpful clue from Jonathan S. below got me on the right track.
I think I understand now what the daily bar graph values mean, but it's a little counter-intuitive and I'd bet not what some others might be assuming as well. The reports states "39,822 Absolute Unique Visitors" at the top, which means just that: over the 30-day period we saw this many uniques. Fair enough. The confusing part is that the daily (or weekly) bar values in the graph below are not mutually exclusive uniques as I had assumed, but are values relative only to the 39,822 total - i.e. there is overlap between the unique visitor counts across any group of days. This means the sum of the daily % values > 100% and the sum of the daily count values > 39,822. The algorithm is: when you visit for the first time in the 30-day period, call that "today", you add 1 to the total (39,822) and 1 to the "today" bar value. When you show up again "tomorrow", you are NOT counted again in the total, but ARE counted as 1 in the "tomorrow" bar value.
alt text http://img.skitch.com/20090922-djti81ejj5gqn575ibf8cj1e8x.jpg
I believe it's just an issue of grouping. The top right of the graph has 3 icons to group by day, week, or month. It's currently grouping by day. So if I visit your site today and come back tomorrow, I'll be counted once for each day.
I tried looking at the month view for one of my sites but it didn't give me much meaningful data. I believe the above should answer your original confusion though.
Is it possible that you're searching for something what isn't existing anymore? Unique Visitors/Visits is old terminology. Check: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-sessions-users-18424.html
Then check how sessions and users are defined:
Sessions ("ex-visits", it's very detailed): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en&ref_topic=1012046
Users in Google Analytics reporting are defined as "Users who have initiated at least one session during the date range". So IMHO it's not about 30 days, it's about the SELECTED date range.
I hope this helps.