Discrepancy between Daily Report visitors and Weekly Report visitors for same day

14 years ago
updated 14 years ago
Answered

I am running two reports with exactly the same settings but different timeranges:

1. Daily report for 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 for the previous day

2. Weekly report for the previous week

My question is, why do some (c. 60%) of the Daily Visitors figures on the Weekly report not match the Total Visitors on the Daily report?

Nothing has changed in the logs between the generation of the reports and the settings/filters are exactly the same.

Sometimes the figures match, but most of the time they are out by 10-20 visitors.

My client is not happy and does not trust the statistics I am producing.

Please help.

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Michael

14 years ago

The issue appears because of visitors that make requests during two or more days. E.g. if a visitor viewed a page few minutes before midnight on Monday and then viewed another page few minutes after midnight on Tuesday, he will be counted only in the row for Monday in daily activity table if you generate weekly statistics. The program uses date of first visitor request as visitor date in the acitivity reports to ensure that the same visitor isn't counted multiple times (in multiple rows/multiple chart points) in these reports.

However, if you create daily report for Tuesday, the program will analyze the second page view of this visitor only and count this visitor in Total Visitors for this day, that will cause the difference.

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Thanks, that sounds very plausible.

Client liked the explanation, thanks.