How is a ‘Unique Visitor’ counted in Matomo?

A Unique Visitor represents an unduplicated individual visiting your website, based on available identification methods such as Matomo’s first-party cookies or User ID. Cookies store the visitor ID and timestamp of the last activity. Session timeouts and cookie settings directly influence how visits and visitors are counted.

  • When cookies are present, each visitor is counted only once per selected reporting period, even if they visit the website multiple times during that time.
  • If the same person accesses your website from two different devices (for example, a laptop and a mobile phone), Matomo will record two Unique Visitors because the identification cookie is device-specific.
  • If the visitor’s browser does not accept Matomo cookies, for example, when cookies are disabled, blocked, or deleted, Matomo attempts to match the visitor based on a combination of features such as IP address, browser type, installed plugins, and operating system. This method (cookieless tracking) is less reliable than cookie-based tracking and may result in some returning visitors being counted as new.

Learn more about how Matomo detects returning and unique visitors.

View Visitor and Visit counts

Matomo calculates Unique Visitor counts differently depending on the selected date range and hosting type.

  • Matomo Cloud shows Unique Visitor counts for daily and weekly reports. Monthly counts are available upon request for subscriptions under 300,000 monthly hits. Unique Visitor counts are not available for yearly or custom date ranges.

  • Matomo On-Premise shows Unique Visitor counts for daily, weekly, and monthly reports. It does not calculate Unique Visitors for year or custom ranges unless specifically enabled. Refer to the guide on enabling the Unique Visitors metric for yearly reports and for custom date ranges.

Go to Visitors > Overview to see the total number of Visits and Unique Visitors for the selected calendar period.

matomo visits count overview

  • You can also use Segments to filter by visitor or visit characteristics depending on your analysis goals.
  • In Custom Reports, you can select metrics such as Visits or Unique Visitors to focus your reporting.

See the Glossary of Analytics terms

Previous FAQ: How is a ‘Visit’ defined in Matomo?