When looking at data in Google Analytics, I prefer to look at unique visitors rather than visits, however, I cannot figure out a way to break up unique visitors by source and medium in an easy way to export/manually enter into excel. When you run traffic reports and want to break out traffic levels by source and medium, are you using Visits? Doesn’t this inflate traffic numbers due to how Google counts visits (new visit after 30 minutes of inactivity or new visit if browser closes)? Is there a way to use New and Returning Visit counts to break out true traffic levels? Any guidance would be appreciated!

I don’t believe this is possible.

Generally if you go to the screen (absolute unique visitors in this case) and in the top right you see the message ‘advanced segments disabled’ then you can’t create straight custom reports or filters based on this info without a lot of workarounds.

Here’s an example of a workaround (not for uniques, just to show what’s possible): http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/06/04/segment-goal-funnel-google-analytics/

Google analytics uniques are 30 minutes of inactivity or close/reopen browser – correct.

When trying to drill down into detail about visitors, I will sometimes leave on all visits, returns, and new visits.

You can also create custom reports and choose unique visitors as a metrics (but this again just shows the new vs returning info). If you have certain reports you want to see this info on, the custom reports can be useful.

It might be possible to do this with custom variables.

Perfect, thanks for the comprehensive answer Brad!

I find Google’s real intent for Analytics is to leave you guessing just enough to keep spending.

I use Woopra side by side with GA. I like to view visits from a Source/Keyword/SitePath/Conversion perspective. Google has all this info, but not connected. Woopra allows this. I run GA too, because I want to see remarketing, network and search results together.

Woopra gives me real, hard numbers instead of Google’s weird math.

woopra.com