Hi everyone. My name is Christos, and I’m going to help you understand some of our foundational metrics in Adobe Analytics, including unique visitors, visits, and page views.

Starting with unique visitors, or commonly referred to as visitors, which are the number of unique individuals that have visited your site as identified by a cookie.

Next in the level of granularity is visits, which is often referred to as a session. So a visit will start when the user arrives at your site and will typically end once they exit or reach 30 minutes of inactivity.

Lastly, page views count the number of times a page is loaded. You will tally one, or more than one, page views on one visit.

So let’s put this into practice here. We have a visitor coming to adobe.com on August 1st. You see that they visit three pages, and thus they tally three page views. Over in the top right, you’ll see our visitor container.

And within that container, you’ll see this visit and the associated page views.

Let’s keep moving on here. On August 3rd, that same visitor comes back and they arrive on a landing page, and they click through to get to the product page, and they register another page view there. They get to a page with more details, but then they eventually exit. So our visitor container, again here on the top right, for this same visitor has registered a second visit on August 3rd with three new page views.

Lastly, we have our third visit. So you’ll see this same person has arrived on a landing page as before, this time on the 7th of August. They’ve navigated through the site, they’ve made it down to the first step of the purchase funnel, and they got distracted and left the site. But, in the meantime, they registered four page views. You’ll see these four pages being captured in our visitor container on the top right here again.

Now I love this method of conceptualizing the relationship of these metrics. As you can see in this Petri dish-looking diagram we have here, for this particular unique visitor, we have all of our page views tallied within each visit. If we were to summarize the total volume of these metrics for this individual visitor in the month of August, we would have collected one visitor, three visits and 10 page views.

Now, this is helpful from a conceptual level, but how does this actually look in the product and how can I use each of these metrics in my day to day, you may be asking. Well, if we were to go ahead into analysis workspace and create a table and a bar chart visualization with unique visitors, visits, and page views, as our metrics, within the month of August, that single visitor from the adobe.com example who contributed three visits, 10 page views, will be added to this site-wide aggregate bucket for each metric. So with this knowledge on an aggregate level, you’ll then begin to start understanding high level visitor behavior, and be able to explain that within a visit, we can have multiple page views occurring. And then within a visitor container, we can have multiple visits occurring. So, to summarize, your unique visitors is your broadest lens. Use this when you want to see a user’s activity across multiple visits. And answering business questions, like how many people are coming to my site in the month of August, or how many people log into our mobile app during that same time period.

Visits is the next level of granularity here. So this is used when you want to see the number of sessions within a period of time. Or if you want to see the top marketing channels that are driving the most visits to your site. You can look at the days of the week with the most visits as well. Just some examples here to get you inspired a bit.

Lastly, page views. Page views can be used when you want to see the count of a page being shown. Common uses here include the top loaded pages, or could even create a ratio or a calculated metric of page loads per visit to get an understanding of engagement and consumption of content on your site.

I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to this content here. Please check out Experience League for more information and documentation on these topics and much, much more. Thank you. -