The Unique Visitors metric is used to understand, overall, how many unique users performed a particular action over a period of time, such as coming to the website, logging into their account, or viewing a Home and Garden product.

Adobe uses cookies to link visits made by the same person to a unique visitor. Essentially it is the visits metric de-duplicated.

For example, if over one week you went to an Argos store on Monday morning, Wednesday morning and Wednesday evening, then over the week time period you would account for 3 visits and 1 Unique Visitor.

If you were looking at a daily breakdown in the above scenario instead of the week as a whole, you would see that Monday would have 1 visit and 1 visitor attributed to it, while Wednesday would have 2 visits and 1 visitor attributed to it. This example shows that it is important to think carefully about the date ranges and breakdowns you are using. It is always best to get a visitor number from as top-level as possible, rather than summing a breakdown which in the example above would give you 2 visitors when in fact there was only 1.

It’s always best to get visitor data at as high a level as possible rather than summing individual elements in a breakdown, as you don’t know where there may be overlap from customers interacting with multiple elements in that breakdown.

FAQ’s / Scenarios to consider

There are several scenarios in which Adobe Analytics will not know that several visits have been made by the same person;

• Moving between channels. If you access the website on your phone and then open the app, Adobe won’t know that you are the same person and you will be counted as 2 visitors.
• Moving Between Devices. If you access the website on your laptop and then on your smartphone, Adobe won’t know that you are the same person and you will be counted as 2 visitors.
• Clearing your cookies or changing browser. If you clear your cookies Adobe won’t know you are the same person on your next visit as you will be assigned new cookie data. If you visit on a different browser Adobe won’t know you are the same person as browsers do not share cookies. In these instances you would be counted as a new visitor.

Q: Do you know I’m the same visitor across different devices or channels?

A: No. We also cannot track a user across channels even if they are accessed from the same device. So for example if you access the website on your smartphone, and then open the app on the same phone, you will count as two visitors on two different channels.

Q: Does opening multiple tabs create multiple visitors?

A: Opening multiple tabs in one browser does not increment visitors, as the tabs all reference the same cookies. Opening a tab in a different browser (e.g. Chrome vs Firefox) will create a new visitor as separate browsers do not reference the same cookies.

Other Visitor metrics

There are several visitor metrics available based on different time ranges and granularities;

• Hourly Unique Visitors
• Daily Unique Visitors
• Weekly Unique Visitors
• Monthly Unique Visitors
• Quarterly Unique Visitors
• Yearly Unique Visitors

Tip: Breaking down the ‘Unique Visitors’ metric by day will give you the same result as using ‘Daily Unique Visitors’ across the same date range.