Google Analytics Can Do The Hard Stuff What About the Easy Stuff

Google Analytics Reporting Help

[shanehorsfall1]

I need to use analytics to measure the number of unique visitors on a given page over a certain period of time.

Easy you would think.

First port of call Content Drilldown, nope - only gives page views and unique page views.

Custom reporting - surely you can add a Visitor metric against a specific page url - to find out how many unique visitors have visited that url in any given time - nope.

Anyone figured this out?

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], shanehorsfall1!

try Dimension: Visitor Type and then at the bottom of the type list specify "include" "New" for Find Visitor Type: and Go.
is that what you need?

[shanehorsfall1]

Thanks phranque, but I can't really follow those instructions!

Don't think that what I want os possible, that is the unique visitors (not visits) to a specific page url (e.g www.google.co.uk/analytics/whatever) for a period of time (the easy part!)

[cgrantski]

It seems like it's "the easy part" but when you think about what the underlying database needs to do to get "unique visitor" numbers that are correct within a given day, versus a given week, versus for the year, you see why Google Analytics may not want to invest in having internal tables of this magnitude. Every hit to every page on your site will need to have every visitor ID recorded, with the date, and kept forever (for checking against the visitor IDs of future visitors to that page). Even for something really simple like just the Pages reporting it's a massive commitment of data space.

All the analytics vendors have this issue. It's why the visitor-centric stat datasets are part of the high-end versions, not the cheaper versions, of the premium analytics solutions like Omniture and WebTrends.