If your Visual Visitor dashboard or exported reports show
visitor counts that seem higher than your actual unique visitor traffic,
session-level duplication is the most common cause.
What causes inflated counts?
· Session-level counting: Visual Visitor counts each unique session in which a visitor is
identified. If the same person visits your site three times in a month across
different sessions, they may appear up to three times in your report depending
on your date range and de-duplication settings.
· Multiple scripts on the same page: If your tracking script is accidentally loaded twice
(e.g., once via GTM and once via direct HTML paste), each page view fires two
identification requests. Verify your tracking script appears exactly once per
page. This is called a dual script / race condition issue.
· Bot traffic: Bots and
scrapers that reach your site can inflate raw session counts. Visual Visitor
automatically filters much of this traffic, but some bot sessions may still
appear. See the article Bot Traffic and Its Impact on Your Email Marketing for
guidance on reviewing and filtering bot sessions.
How to check for dual script
loading
Open your website in a
browser, go to Developer Tools (F12 > Network).
Filter the network requests
for visualvisitor.
If you see the same script
loading twice per page load, you have a dual-script issue. Remove one of
the script instances - typically the manually pasted version if you are
using GTM.
Reporting de-duplication: When pulling reports for client presentations, filter
your export by unique email address to deduplicate visitor sessions into
individual people.
The Query Export tool supports this filtering.
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