For all of you stats junkies — you know who you are! — we’ve added some holiday cheer to your WordPress.com Stats Page. In addition to the number of views your site receives, you can now keep tabs on how many unique visitors come to your site, all on a single, easy-to-read chart.

A visitor is a unique user or browser/device that views one or more posts or pages on your site. When your friend checks out your site from her laptop and then again from her phone, that’s two visits.  If she clicks on four different posts, that’s four views.

At a glance, you can now get a feel for how these numbers relate:

Hover over a day, week, or month in the chart to see how many views and unique visitors you had. To make this data even more useful, we do the math for you & tell you what your approximate number of views per visitor is. If many of your readers view a lot of your content, that’ll be a high number; if each reader only checks out a few posts, it’ll be lower.

There isn’t an ideal number of views per visitor

The ratio of views to visitors will be different for different types of sites, depending on the nature of your content, where your traffic comes from, how frequently you publish new content, and a host of other variables. You might also notice that weekly unique visitors is less than the sum of daily visitors for the same week. This occurs when the same person visits your site multiple times during the week — likewise for monthly visitors, which may be less than sum of weekly.

Right now, your visitor counts are slightly delayed. This new metric depends on complex, computationally intensive calculations.  We’re continually fine-tuning the mechanisms we use to make them as quick and accurate as possible.

For those of you with self-hosted sites, Jetpack users haven’t been left out in the cold! Browse to your WordPress.com Stats Page and check out your new metrics.

Happy analyzing!