Normally if I fetch a report with range=week for example, I get the sum_daily_nb_uniq_visitors metric. But in our custom reports, we get no metric for unique visitors without using range=day.
Is this a known limitation of custom reports, or are we doing it wrong on our end?
“Unique visitors” is included as a metric in the reports in question, and we do get nb_uniq_visitors for individual days. I don’t get why the sum is being left out of weekly reports…?
In custom report, Unique Visitor metric is available only for individual day and it is expected. We have an internal ticket to make it clear.
Thanks for the quick response @karthik! Is this something that could be added in a future version, or is it a fundamental limitation of how custom reports work? I was just surprised since it is included in other reports, so I assumed it would be trivial to add them up for custom reports too.
It is a bit of a showstopper for us, since we need custom reports for things where we would also need the unique visit numbers for long date ranges at a time. And fetching several months or more as individual days just times out.
Totally understand that perspective and I’m sorry to say that this is how Custom Report deals with Unique Visitor metric and we don’t have a better option for your use case currently. Of course nothing is written in stone, and if our product team sees other requests like yours to make changes to how Custom Reports currently performs, that may change. I can’t make any promises what the future holds, so I want to be honest about our current plans here.
@karthik Got it, thanks for letting me know. We would very much appreciate the “sum uniques” metric in our custom reports, so fingers crossed it gets added eventually 
Otherwise we would have to break our ranges up into smaller requests and have each user spam Matomo, or write a proxy API or something. Neither of which is a very attractive option of course.
Sorry to comment on an old topic, but I would like to add my vote for this feature somehow
And thank you for bringing it up on the forum, I keep adding “unique visitors” columns to custom reports (forgetting that they only work for day-periods). Then I go through the whole “how to enable unique visitors for year-period” instructions, and then spin my wheels a bit wondering why they still don’t work.
It might be good to have documentation clarifying that the general enable_processing_unique_visitors_year = 1 trick doesn’t affect custom reports?
Anyway, thanks again for the info!
Hello Matomo team, this is generally an expected thing and surprised to see this is not done yet in the “custom reports” feature.
Request you to kindly get this prioritized, as this seems to be a basic functionality missing.
Hi @siva538 ,
I have updated the ticket, so that our Product team will be notified on this.
Thanks Karthik. Just checking if we have an update on when this would be available. As you know custom reports is an important feature and we are heavily dependent on that.
Alternatively, if we have to pull out the information from the database ourselves, can you please tell me how to do that?
We are ok to run a one off query once in a month (even if it takes long), and pull the unique visitors for the defined custom report.
Thanks a lot.
Hi @siva538 ,
Unique visitors metric is present in log_visit and it is based on the visitor_returning column. If the visitor returning is 1 then it is not unique. Please write a SQL query to fetch this data and filter it based on the site id.