Reading Your Traffic Chart: Visits vs. Unique Visitors
A plain explanation of what the two lines on your Analytics traffic chart actually count, so neither number gets misread as something it isn't.
The traffic chart on your Analytics dashboard shows two lines — Visits and Unique Visitors — and it's easy to assume they mean more than they do. Here's exactly what each one counts.
Visits (count)
This line is a simple daily total: every matching tracked event recorded that day. If the same person loads five pages, that's five events counted toward that day's total. It's a volume number, not a people number.
Unique Visitors
This line counts something different — the number of distinct sessions that generated an event that day, not the number of distinct people. Under the hood, it's a COUNT(DISTINCT session_id) query against that day's events. A session is tied to a browser session, not to a signed-in Piskes account, so it's a session-based measure of activity rather than an authenticated-user count.
Why the distinction matters
If the same person visits from their phone in the morning and their laptop at night, that's two sessions — and Unique Visitors will count it as two, even though it's one person. Conversely, if someone clears cookies or opens a private window, a returning visitor can look "new" again. Neither number is wrong — they're just measuring what they say they're measuring: total activity, and distinct sessions behind that activity. Neither line is a count of unique, authenticated humans, and reading it that way will overstate or understate your real audience depending on how your visitors browse.
We built the chart this way because it reflects what the tracking pipeline can actually and honestly know at the point an event is recorded, rather than implying identity resolution the platform doesn't do.