How to view unique visitors in Google Analytics

Is anybody out there? When you pour your creativity and hard work into your website, service, or marketing campaigns, it’s nice to know whether people pay attention. Tracking unique visitors is one way to confirm real people see and appreciate your efforts. It also helps you communicate your impact to stakeholders and make customer-driven decisions.

This guide explains the unique visitors (also known as total users) metric in Google Analytics, how to measure it, and when to pair the metric with insights from other tools. 

What is the total users metric—which replaced unique visitors—in Google Analytics?

In the days of Universal Analytics (RIP 🪦), Google Analytics encouraged users to track unique visitors, and added this metric to reports as standard. However, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) promotes ‘total users’ as its primary metric for counting overall visitor numbers instead.

‘Total users’ is functionally the same as ‘unique visitors’—except with a new name. 

Total users in GA4 is the total number of people who visited your site or app within a specified date range. To be counted as a ‘user’ a person landing on your site must trigger an ‘event’. The definition of an event is broad enough to cover every visitor: GA4’s ‘automatically collected events’ include visiting for the first time (‘first_visit’), viewing a page (‘page_view’), and simply starting a session (‘session_start’). 

Total users only counts every user once. For example, if Nicole visits your site 3 times, Tawni visits 2 times, and Stephanie visits 4 times, GA4 counts that as 3 users—even though there were 9 separate sessions. 

There is no functional difference between the new metric of total users, and the old one of unique users. The difference in their name is one of emphasis:

• Unique visitors underscores the fact that the metric counts individual users, rather than sessions 

• Total users stresses that this metric records an overall number of (still individual) users for a given time period. This differentiates ‘total users’ from ‘active users’—another important metric that counts the number of users who recorded an engaged session in a given period. 

How to find total users in GA4 

There are 2 spots in GA4’s automatically generated reports where you can find the metric of total users. When you view them, please note that the default reporting period will be set to 28 days—change this by clicking on the date range in the top right corner of your screen. 

1. Engagement events report

The first place to view ‘total users’ in GA4 is through the ‘Events’ report:

1. Open the ‘Reports’ tab in the sidebar on the far left 

2. Click on ‘Engagement’ under the ‘Life cycle’ section

3. Select ‘Events’ from the drop-down menu

4. Read the ‘Total users’ column

The GA4 events report counts total users which they define as ‘the total number of unique users who log an event’ 

2. User acquisition report

The second option to view total users in GA4 is through the 'User acquisition’ report: 

1. Open the ‘Reports’ tab in the sidebar on the far left

2. Click on ‘Acquisition’, and then select ‘User acquisition’

3. Read the ‘Total users’ column

GA4 tracks total users in their user acquisition report  

💡Pro tip: if you’re already quite familiar with GA4, you can create customized reports with the total users metric using the ‘Explore’ tab. To do this:

1. Select ‘Explore’ from the sidebar on the left, and head to their template gallery

2. Open the ‘Acquisition’ template

3. Scroll down the menu on the far left until you see a heading that says ‘Metrics’. Click the grey plus icon (+) and another menu will appear. 

4. Search for ‘Total users’, tick its box, and click ‘Confirm’ to add this metric to your custom report

5. Head to the ‘Settings’ columns, and scroll down to the section called ‘Values’. Click on ‘+ Drop or select metric’—and you will be able to add the metric ‘Total users’. Go ahead and do that.

6. This will create a ‘Total users’ column in the far right of your spreadsheet. If you’d like to make it more prominent in your chart, slide the ‘Total users’ field up in the list of ‘Values’. 

In the Explore tab, go to your ‘Metrics column’ and add ‘Total users’, then, select this metric from your ‘Values’ column 

When to use total users in Google Analytics

The total users metric shows you the number of individual users you reach, regardless of whether they visit your website once or 10 times. 

If you counted sessions instead of total users, you’d have a skewed perception of how many customers completed an event, like viewing a product page—imagine if Nicole’s 3 sessions, Tawni’s 2 sessions, and Stephanie’s 4 sessions counted as 9 users instead of the actual 3.

Here are 3 scenarios where you’d use unique visitors in Google Analytics as a starting point to understand user behavior. 

1. Measure your website’s reach

Imagine a product marketer has custom events in GA4 to measure blog visits and lead magnet landing pages. At the end of the year, they include total users (AKA unique visitors) in a report for stakeholders to compare their performance against goals. 

They also include the ‘event count per user’ to measure how many times unique users view content on average.

❗️But Google Analytics can’t reveal why users return or decide to stop visiting to help the product marketer decrease bounce rate. 

2. Compare website traffic before and after updates

Suppose a product designer needs to gauge whether a navigation redesign makes it easier for users to find a particular page on their app, so they compare website traffic and monthly total users for that event from before and after the update. 

The total users count in GA4 reveals whether they met, exceeded, or failed at their engagement goal.

❗️ But Google Analytics doesn’t show how users interact with the redesign. 

3. Determine how far users get down the sales funnel

Let’s say a product manager wants to understand how far most website visitors make it in the ecommerce checkout flow, so they compare total users for various conversion events, like viewing an item, beginning checkout, and adding payment information. 

GA4 will show them a steep decline in users between beginning checkout and finalizing a purchase.

❗️ But Google Analytics won't show them the reason for the decline.

🚨 Keep in mind: total users in GA4 indicate user volume but not behavior. And if you want to make informed decisions about what to keep, change, or get rid of to create a better customer experience, you need to combine qualitative and quantitative data. 

For example, if you saw that more people added item A to their cart than item B, you might assume item B lacks product-market fit. But that quantitative data alone won’t tell you that the buttons on item B’s web page are broken or that you’re promoting item B to the wrong user persona.

Combining website analytics with experience intelligence tools reveals how users behave and why.

How to pair unique visitors with experience intelligence tools

Experience intelligence platforms—like Contentsquare—let you observe and learn from users with tools like session replays, heatmaps, surveys, and interviews to build on your GA4 discoveries.

Simply adding an exit-intent survey to the ‘item A vs. item B’ scenario above would reveal that customers want item B in a different color or that crucial details are missing from the product description. 

Let’s revisit the scenarios from the previous section to understand how experience intelligence helps teams dig deeper into user behavior patterns. 

Hear about customer preferences directly from them

Think back to the marketing team measuring the reach of their blog and how often users came back for more. 

To make their future content customer-centric, they’d use a tool like Contentsquare to

• Interview customers about what stood out to them, their likes and dislikes, goals, and what they want to learn

• Concept test blog image styles via a survey to learn which designs drive engagement, so they can carry out optimizations

Contentsquare offers a customizable concept testing survey template, so you can start collecting user feedback quickly. 

See how customers move through your website

The product designer from earlier uses total users in GA4 to measure how well a redesign drives traffic to a particular step in the customer journey. 

The next step in their investigation is to watch video-style replays of user sessions—with a tool like Contentsquare’s Session Replays. This reveals exactly how users scroll, move, and rage click on the page. 

When the designer realizes the culprit is a banner that users thought they could click, they rework the page and see engagement increase.

Contentsquare users can sort replays based on frustration score to prioritize those sessions with issues

Understand why customers convert (or leave)

Finally, recall the product manager who views total users at each milestone to analyze the sales funnel. 

GA4 revealed a steep decline in users between beginning checkout and finalizing a purchase, so the product manager would analyze scroll heatmaps to see how far down each page customers usually scroll. 

To narrow their focus even more, the product manager uses Contentsquare Funnel Analysis to view sessions of low-engagement pages to uncover a bug that caused the drop-offs, improving the user experience.

Contentsquare Funnels reveals engagement at each step of your sales funnel so you can quickly home in on problem areas

Have a plan before you dive into Google Analytics reports

GA4 is a powerful web analytics tool, but the different terms and charts become overwhelming if you wander in too deep without a plan. 

First, choose a question to answer, like, “How many people interacted with our blog this year?” or “Are there points in the sales funnel where customers drop off?” Then, use the total users (unique visitors) metric in GA4 to gauge user volume for the event. 

Since GA’s quantitative data only gets you so far, you need to use an experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare to make sense of that data and learn how your audience interacts with your website or app. 

The more you know about the what, why, when, and how of customer experience, the quicker you’ll delight customers, increase engagement, and boost conversion rates.

FAQ about GA4’s unique visitors