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I am just now starting to catch up on a lot of the reading I missed between Christmas and about the 5th of January.  So I just got around to reading a post in the official Google Analytics blog called, "Absolute Unique Visitors" versus "New and Returning".  After reading that post for just a moment I was confused, which is a problem since I already understood the concept prior to reading the post in Google's Blog.  In other words their attempt to clairify the concept confused someone who already completely understood it.

Hence I have decided to try to explain it myself with a lot less explanation and keeping it as simple as I can.  I am not sure how well I will pull this off because while easy to understand I might find explaining it in text is more complicated then I think.  Still I can't possibly make it as confusing as the Google blog did, or can I?  Let's find out. 

OK, let's start with absolute unique visitors.  This is really pretty simple to understand.  The screen shot below is from one of my websites for the dates of Jan 1 - Jan 12 of 2007.  As you can see this site received 10,751 "absolute unique visitors".  This simply means 10,751 different individuals visited my site during those dates.  Those who visited more then once during that time frame were only counted one time. 

Then if you look at the graph it has two groups, first time visitors and prior visitors.  First time visitors are people who have never visited the site at any time ever.  Prior visitors have visited the site at least one time prior to the time frame in question, (in this case prior to Jan. 1, 2007).  That is really all there is to this and about as simple as I can explain it.

 OK, so now let's look at New and Returning Visitors, during the same time frame.  Here you will notice the site received a total of 12,027 "visitors" during the period, a number higher then the 10,751 above because if you visited my site on Jan. 1 and 5 above you would be counted one time but in the stats below you would count as twice because you "visited" on two differenent times.  Make sense?  Each time you leave the site and then return you are counted as a "visitor". 

Now of those 12,027 visitors, about 73% were from people that came to the site for the first time ever.  Where as about 26% were from people who had visited the site at any point in the past. 

OK, so how did I do?  About the same as Google?  Worse, are you more confused then ever?  Or did I manage to pull it off and make it at least a little more clear?

 ~ Jack Spirko

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