Calling it ‘Unique Visitors’ is just wrong and misleading

According to Plausible’s own help files, “if the same visitor visits your site on five different days in a month we would show that as five unique visitors.” The thing is, that’s not what the term “Unique Visitors” means—as should be obvious from the name. UVs is by definition a de-duplicated figure.

Basically, Plausible can identify and therefore de-duplicate users only within a single day (due to privacy stuff). So for a 1-day report, “Unique Visitors” means what it says. But for a report of any longer period, the label is just misleading and confusing.

My suggestion would be that Plausible reports should automatically change the name of this metric whenever the time-period is set to greater than one day. Although, frankly, I don’t know what I’d call the new metric, which is actually something like “Sum Total of Daily Visitors.” It’s not very useful. Maybe for longer periods the metric should just switch to something completely different that Plausible can actually provide, like Average Daily Visitors.

Another partial solution would be to at least add an annotation anywhere the term “Unique Visitors” appears, explaining how it works.

“Another partial solution would be to at least add an annotation anywhere the term “Unique Visitors” appears, explaining how it works.”
I agree with you.