Daily Unique Visitors more than Daily Visits? Is it possible? | SiteCatalyst & Discover

Good break guys??? Well I'll try to cover more than a couple of things today to discuss topics which are really important to understand how SiteCatalyst collects data.

So the initial question I am trying to answer here is how come my SiteCatalyst is showing me count of daily visitors more than visits for a particular day? Is there any implementation problem or do I need to see an optician?

Before this, we need to understand how SiteCatalyst determines a visitor. SiteCatalyst uses following 2 mechanisms to determine a unique visitor :
1. Primary method is using persistent cookie on user's browser.
2. If a visitor has disabled disabled cookies or his/her browser doesn't support persistent cookies then SiteCatalyst uses combination of IP address and user agent string.

Discover determines a unique visitor in the same way as SiteCatalyst does.

Now the interesting fact, SiteCatalyst doesn't track a visit if it's on a system that doesn't support persistent cookies. However, Discover does. This is an important fact you should remember in case you need to answer a query on difference between visits reported in SiteCatalyst and Discover.

So what? My question..my question...my question...., hold on, haven't I answered this already? If more" No -cookies" customers visit your site, then they'll be counted in unique visitors (using IP address and user agent sting) but will not contribute in Visits metric of SiteCatalyst.

PathViews is another metric where SiteCatalyst will not report if visitor has cookies disbaled or persistent cookies are not accepted. Discover will do.

What we learnt today:
1. How Omniture tracks unique visitors?
2. Exception rules for SiteCatalyst visit tracking
3. Some more differences between Discover and SiteCatalyst
4. How to crack bad jokes like this 4th point

Summary:

	Cookies accepted	Cookies not accepted
SiteCatalyst	PageViews – Yes PathViews - Yes Visits – Yes Visitors – Yes	PageViews – Yes PathViews – No Visits – No Visitors – Yes
Discover	PageViews – Yes PathViews - Yes Visits – Yes Visitors – Yes	PageViews – Yes PathViews – Yes Visits – Yes Visitors – Yes