The Year-on-Year screen compares each month’s unique visitors with the same month a year earlier — the truest view of long-term growth and seasonality. Open it from Traffic → Year-on-Year.
The chart
Unique Visitors — This Period vs a Year Earlier plots the last 12 months as a solid line, with the previous year overlaid as a dashed line. Where the solid line sits above the dashed, you’ve grown vs. the same month last year.
Monthly Breakdown
A table with one row per month:
- Unique Visitors and New Visitors for the month.
- Same Month Last Year for direct comparison.
- YoY Change — the percentage up or down.
The current month is marked (so far) since it’s still in progress, so a negative YoY there is expected until the month completes.
Why this survives data pruning
*Unique visitors are counted exactly per calendar month (a visitor active on
many days counts once) and stored permanently — so this comparison stays
accurate even after older raw visit data is removed by the retention policy.*
This is the key design point: even if you prune raw visit data after, say, 365 days (see Settings & Privacy), your year-on-year history remains intact because the monthly unique-visitor totals are rolled up and kept permanently. The same applies to WooCommerce revenue roll-ups, so sales YoY survives pruning too.
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Screenshots are illustrative — see the note on the documentation index.