How Foresite counts

Unique visitors

Foresite never stores anything on visitors' devices, so it can't recognise a returning visitor the way cookies do. Instead, for each site and each day, it computes a one-way hash of the visitor's IP address and browser details together with a random secret that changes every day. The secret is destroyed once the day ends in your site's time zone.

This means:

• A visitor is counted once per day, however many pages they view.
• The same person on two different days counts as two visitors. Over a week or a month, "Visitors" is the sum of each day's unique visitors.
• Nobody, including us, can link a visitor's activity across days or across sites.

Sessions and bounce rate

A session is a run of pageviews and events by the same visitor with no gap longer than 30 minutes. It never crosses midnight, because a visitor can't be recognised across days. A bounce is a session with exactly one pageview and no events.

Sources

The source of a session is its first referrer, or its utm_source tag if the address has one. Clicks on Google, Microsoft, TikTok, X and LinkedIn ads are recognised by the click ID the ad platform adds, and shown as paid sources such as Google Ads. Every event in that session is credited to the session's source and campaign tags.

What's never counted

Bots and automated browsers, your own excluded browsers, local development (localhost), and floods of events from a single visitor or network are filtered out before anything is stored. Filtered events never count toward your price.