How can # of unique visitors be more than # of visits?

Posted by Dallas on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Dallas
Published on 2012-03-02T22:23:07Z Indexed on 2012/10/15 9:50 UTC
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I am confused as heck. When looking at a few individual pages, I am seeing weird results I hope someone can help explain.

I am doing manual standard reports, and not creating or using a widget. For each of the two tests below, the metrics I am using are visits (not visitors) and unique visitors. I am using Page as my primary dimension and Page Title as secondary. I am filtering to include certain Pages.

Example 1 - Looking at a single page... I see 731 unique visitors and 169 visits. How is this possible? Does google just flip them around for some reason?

Example 2 - Looking at several pages combined... If you examine the timeline below , you can see that the numbers are all over the place. How is it possible to have more unique visitors than visits? What am I missing? I would suspect that if things were just flipped around, then I should still see one line that is always below the other line. Anyone clue me in to what may be happening here?

I also notice that the visits column (just out of view) adds up to the total, but the unique visitors column clearly doesn't.

graphic here

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