Jonathan5 asked if there have been any changes since 2018 regarding unique visitor statistics on Discourse, noting that Sam Saffron had previously said it was not a built-in metric. Bas replied that unique visitors per month is still not built-in, but there are similar reports available via the Admin Dashboard and Data Explorer. He advised being careful comparing Discourse stats to external analytics like Google Analytics since the assumptions behind the calculations differ.
Continuing the discussion from Is there any Discourse based community who reached 100k daily visits?:
This quotation is from a 2018 topic. Has anything changed since then? What I’d like really is “x unique visitors per month” so that I can get an average for various periods.
It’s not out of the box as far as I know, though we have similar reports available and I’m sure you can do a lot with a Data Explorer query.
What would you be using it for?
Be wary of comparing it to e.g. Google Analytics on your website, since they will be using different assumptions in their calculations. (e.g. we’d be consolidating IP-addresses/devices based on user name, while GA would be blissfully unaware of usernames).