Why is the number of visitors in the Visits Overview report different from other reports?

The Visitors > Visits Overview report shows the total number of unique visitors to your website for the selected date range. In contrast, other reports, such as Country or Acquisition, show unique visitors per dimension value. These reports count the number of unique visitors within each segment (e.g. per country, per channel), and not across the entire website.

This can lead to varying totals when comparing reports with the Visits Overview. For example, the following report shows 9,906 unique visitors to the website for the day while the Country report shows 10,093 unique visitors.

If someone first visits the site from Germany, and later returns from the United Kingdom, they will be counted as a unique visitor in each country, whereas they are only counted as one unique visitor in the Visits Overview report.

Another example is the Acquisition > All Channels report, where a single visitor arriving first via a Google Ad and later returning via a direct link, will appear once in each channel. This is expected because each report correctly shows unique visitors per dimension, and totals may appear higher than the Visits Overview because individual users can match multiple values.

The Visits Overview report gives the most accurate view of your total audience size. Other reports help understand how those visitors engage through different dimensions like location or acquisition channel.