Working with Report Results - Yahoo! Web Analytics - page 144

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Figure 6.12 Weekly unique visitors, October 1 to October 3, 2008
Figure 6.12 illustrates my point: We did not have 5,136 but more like 4,862
unique visitors—a conclusion i came to by using the data selection box.
this is not perfect; doing a count of unique visitors for the three-day period
would have been better, but i am sure you get my point.
the beautiful part of Yahoo! Web Analytics is that it is in real time and you can
essentially play with your data by changing the dates and see the impact. this approach
is a great way to spot seasonality and gain insights that you did not know about.
Unique Visitor
A unique visitor is a statistic describing a unit of traffic to a website, counting each visitor only
once in the time frame of the report. This statistic is relevant to site publishers and advertisers as
a measure of a site's true audience size, equivalent to the term reach used in other media.
Time Comparative Reporting
You can always save a report, export data, take a note, or otherwise save the informa-
tion from one period and then compare it to another. however, Yahoo! Web Analytics
allows you to do comparative reporting in the interface.
What i like the most is that once you compare two periods, say Q1 2009 to Q2
2009, you stay in what i call comparative mode . comparative mode means that if you
move from one report to another, the new report shows differences between old and
new data for each metric you have chosen to display. comparative mode is useful if