[thelist] Understanding Google Analytics

[Fred Jones]

Home page for GA seems to be Audience -- Overview. There I see "3,547
people visited this site" for a certain site. It also says:

5,848 Visits
3,547 Unique Visitors
7,747 Pageviews
1.32 Pages/Visit

Now if I click on Traffic Sources - Overview I see "5,848 people
visited this site." Doesn't make sense to me. On the first page that
was the number of visits, not visitors. Now GA implies those are
visitors.

My client hired someone for a bit of SEO and agreed to pay him per
"thousand Visitors to the site" and now they are arguing about whether
it's 3 or 5 thousand. The client says that 3K is Visitors and 5K is
Visits and thus he owes for 3K. The SEO guys says that 5K is the
"total number of visitors" and 3K is "unique visitors" which was not
the agreement and the client owes for 5K.

I think the client is correct, but can anyone shed some light on this?
Perhaps with some sources to verify? I Googled but I don't find
anything clear regarding how GA works in this aspect.

Thanks.