How are unique visitors calculated?

Answer

Number of unique visitors is calculated during a selected time period as determined by a distinct? IBM Digital Analytics permanent cookie.?

The new visitors are the number of unique first time visitors during a selected time period. This includes visitors who never received a? IBM Digital Analytics cookie from your web site and visitors who previously received the? IBM Digital Analytics cookie but deleted it. In order to track a unique visitor the permanent session cookie is placed on the visitor's computer.

For example we calculate unique visitors within a fiscal date range. So if a visitor comes on a Monday and then returns that Thursday they are considered one unique visitor each day but one unique visitor for the fiscal week. Same thing with fiscal month; if someone comes to the site seven times in the month; they will still be one unique visitor. Custom date ranges don't utilize 'unique' metrics past the one-day point. So if I put the date range of Monday through Sunday and someone comes twice on Monday they will be one unique visitor. But if they come twice on Monday once on Wednesday and once on Friday they will count as three visitors. If you had a fiscal date range it would de-duplicate it for you and tell you that all four visits were from one person. But if you use the custom date range it would take too long for it to process everything on 'the fly' so it does an 'ADDED DAILY SUM'.

The importance behind uniqueness is that clients want to know how many visitors they have in a month not visits or sessions but true visitors. Thus uniqueness is involved and we have to de-duplicate that visitor?s sessions to ensure they are only one visitor.