Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring visitors to your Web site. However it can be slightly confusing for clients who do not use Analytics regularly to understand the difference in the measurement of visits and visitors in their account. Visits is the number of times users have visited your site. These are also called ’sessions’. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session and will count again. However if a user leaves your site and then returns within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session. You can see that the same user can count more than once if there is gap of 30 minutes or more between them viewing your site.
A Visitor on the other hand is a term used by Google to try and give you a close as possible to definition of the number of actual, distinct people who visit your Web site. There is no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the Web site’s perspective, but a good visitor tracking system can come close to the actual number.
‘Visitors’ represents the number of unique users that visit your site on a daily basis. Any sessions from the same user on the same day will be aggregated into a single visitor, but may represent two or more separate visits.
In the Absolute Unique Visitor report, all visits from the same user for the entire active date range you have selected will be aggregated so that they will be counted as a single absolute unique visitor, regardless of how many different days they visited your site and how many times they visited your site on each day.
So in summary a Visit is counted once within 30 minutes, a Visitor is counted once within a day and an Absolute Unique Visitor only once within the time frame you select.
