Daily Unique Visitors in Analysis Workspace

Recently, one of the members of our Adobe Analytics Expert Council (AAEC) was lamenting that in the [old] Reports interface of Adobe Analytics, there is a Daily Unique Visitors metric, but that this metric is not available in Analysis Workspace. In the Reports interface, you can add Unique Visitors as a metric, which de-duplicates unique visitors for the currently selected date range, but you can also add Daily Unique Visitors which provides a sum of daily unique visitors for all of the dates in the selected timeframe. Unfortunately, in Analysis Workspace, you can only see the former (Unique Visitors) and there may be times that you want to see daily unique visitors for dimension values. As I have demonstrated in the past, I am on a mission to be able to do 100% of what could be done in the Reports interface in Analysis Workspace, so in this post, I will share a workaround that will allow you to add daily unique visitors to your Analysis Workspace projects.

Daily Uniques in Old Interface

To begin, let’s look at how daily unique visitors works in the old interface. Let’s imagine that you want to see unique visitors and daily unique visitors for a dimension (eVar) in your implementation. For example, let’s look at these metrics for my blog posts:

In this report, I am looking at just one day of data, so the two columns of data are exactly the same. But if I change the date range to be the last seven days, these metrics will start to diverge. The amount of divergence will depend on how often your site has return visitors:

In this case, for the week there have been 129 unique visitors who have viewed my UTM Campaign blog post, but that number rises to 135 if you count unique visitors on a daily basis. If you wanted to view this exact report in Analysis Workspace, you would think that it is as simple as clicking the “Try in Workspace” button shown above. But doing this does the following:

As you can see, the daily unique visitor column is stripped out because Analysis Workspace doesn’t have a notion of daily unique visitors.

Creating Daily Unique Visitors in Analysis Workspace

In order to re-create the old interface seven-day report that has both unique visitors and daily unique visitors in Analysis Workspace, we will have to do a bit of calculated metric and segment gymnastics. While the process is a bit manual, the good news is that it can be set up once and re-used with any dimension in the future.

To start, you have to choose a timeframe for which you’d like to view daily unique visitors. To keep things simple, I am going to assume that I want to see daily unique visitors for seven days. To start, I am going to create seven rolling date ranges. Adobe already provides a date range for Yesterday and Two Days Ago, so in this case, I have created the ones for 3-7 days ago.

Each of the new date ranges will be set up as rolling date ranges being X days prior from today and will look similar to this:

Once you have the seven individual date ranges created, you can create a segment for each. Each segment will simply contain the corresponding date range and be constructed like this:

When you are done, you will have these segments:

Once you have the required date range segments, the final step is to create a new calculated metric that includes a sum of all seven days. This calculated metric will use unique visitors as the metric, but will sum a segmented version of unique visitors for each day. Here is what the seven-day formula would look like:

Using Daily Unique Visitors in Analysis Workspace

So now that we have our seven-day daily unique visitors calculated metric, let’s see how we can use it to re-create the reports from the old interface. As a refresher, here is what the report looked like in the old interface when we looked at seven days of data:

Now,  Let’s add our new calculated metric to the same report in Analysis Workspace:

As you can see, we have successfully duplicated the daily unique visitor metric in Analysis Workspace!

Of course, this process is more manual than I’d like. If you want to see daily unique visitors for thirty days, you would have to create thirty rolling date ranges and thirty segments (and a long calculated metric!), but the good news is that once you have done this, you can use the calculated metric in any dimension report. For example, here is a daily unique visitor report for pages for the last seven days from the old interface:

Here is the same report in Analysis Workspace using our new seven-day daily unique visitor calculated metric:

In case it is helpful, here is a video of how I got from the report in the old interface to the one in the new interface: