CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analyticsuniquevisitors
es.16
es.16

Reputation: 119

Unique Users in Google Analytics

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)?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1197

Answers (1)

J Brazier
J Brazier

Reputation: 884

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.

Upvotes: 1

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