Methodology behind News Item Views & Site Visits in modern SharePoint online

[Caite Stevens]

I'm wondering about the counting methodology behind News Views and also Site Visits (in Site Usage) for modern SharePoint sites. 

I thought it was straightforward, but it is not. 

I have a News Item on a site to which only 8 people currently have access. Somehow the News Item has 19 views. How is that possible? I thought it was tracking unique views - i.e. if Joe Blow reads the article 5 times with 5 clicks, it should only count as one view, right? The author has edited and republished the News Item a number of times, so I thought perhaps every time it gets published, the count is added to? But I can't find any info on this anywhere. 

Similarly, this same site has 109 views in the past 7 days. I am guessing these are not unique views, but simply the number of times anyone visits. And again, I can't find any articles that explain the logic behind this. 

Anyone got any concrete info? Thanks!

[#2]

Assuming you are targeted release, If you go to Site Pages, and hover over a page (News page) you'll get a Views + Unique visitors listed there. You can do this technically with any "Document" on SPO and OneDrive now. But your right, views are just total clicks / views regardless of user.

There is supposed to be a new site page coming out that does a better job of rolling up that data, but I've seen that things since last summer and it's still not out yet :p.