Often if you present too much stuff to normal audience (non geeky tech guys) they might go in confusion.If you had to present a simple minimalistic website's monthly statistics to someone, with one and only one graph.Would you show them a graph of total visits per month, or a graph with total unique visits per month? And why one vs the other?
Presenting very simple and minimalistic stats graph to final user, unique visitor or visits?
statistics
I would show a graph with the business metrics they are trying to improve, if they are trying to get more visitors to the site then unique visitors would be best if they are trying to get more of their visitors to return to the site then show a graph that compares unique visitors to totals visits (IE so they can see visits per visitor are increasing) if they are looking to increase ad views then pageviews might be the only metric necessary. If they are looking at revenue or some other money related metric for success then visits or uniques would only be useful if you can show how they convert. Your absolutely right that when you show too many metrics it gets confusing, but the best metric to show is the one that relates to how you measure success.