Total Traffic
BeginnerTotal traffic is the sum of all measured visits to a site within the selected range, and it is the denominator behind every share and percentage in a report.
The figure comes from summing the chosen metric across every slice of the site: all sources, all pages, all countries. Summation is only valid for event-like units such as pageviews and sessions; users are not additive, so total users never equals the sum of users per source, and one person arriving from both search and social appears in both rows but once in the total. When the table rows do not add up to the total, the cause is usually unassigned traffic or a row limit on the table rather than broken data. The number is also sensitive to filter settings and to whether bots are included, which is why two tools measuring the same site never report the same total.
How it is calculated
Total traffic = the sum of the chosen metric across every slice of the site within the time range
The unit must always be named, because total traffic in pageviews and total traffic in sessions are two very different numbers. Summation is valid for pageviews and sessions but not for users, where each identifier is counted once across the whole range.