What each number means
Every number on your dashboard, in plain terms. For how visitors are counted without cookies, see how we count.
The five headline numbers
The tiles across the top of your dashboard. Click one to chart it.
Unique visitors
How many different people visited your site.
Someone who visits five pages in a day is one visitor. Foresite can't recognise a person from one day to the next, so the same person on two different days counts as two visitors. Over a week or a month, Unique visitors is each day's visitors added together. Because of this, it's usually higher than the "users" figure in tools that track people across days.
Pageviews
How many pages were loaded. Every page load counts, including reloads and a visitor coming back to the same page.
If one person views your home page, then your pricing page, then your home page again, that's three pageviews.
Visits
How many separate visits people made. A visit starts when someone arrives and ends when they've done nothing on your site for 30 minutes. If they come back after that, it's a new visit. A visit also ends at midnight in your site's time zone.
One visitor can make several visits in a day: say, once in the morning and again after lunch. That's one visitor and two visits.
Bounce rate
The share of visits where someone viewed just one page and did nothing else. If 100 people arrive and 40 of them leave without clicking to another page, your bounce rate is 40%.
A visit that triggers a custom event, such as a signup or a file download, isn't a bounce, even if it stays on one page. Lower is usually better, so a falling bounce rate shows in green. A single-page site, or a blog post that answers its question, can have a high bounce rate and still be doing its job.
Visit duration
How long a visit lasts on average, from the first page to the last thing the visitor did.
Foresite only knows when something happens, such as a page loading, not when someone closes the tab. So the time spent on the last page of a visit isn't counted, and a visit with one page counts as 0 seconds. Bounces pull the average down; that's expected.
Comparisons
Under each headline number is its change from the period before, of the same length. Looking at the last 30 days, "↑ 12%" means 12% more than the 30 days before that. Green is good news and red is bad: for bounce rate, a rise is red.
The chart shows the previous period as a dotted line. "No previous data" means there was nothing to compare with, usually because your site wasn't measured yet.
Visitors now
The number beside your site's name: how many people did something on your site in the last 5 minutes. It updates every 30 seconds.
Sources
Where visitors came from. Every pageview and event in a visit is credited to the source the visit started from.
- Sources groups visits by where they came from: Google, Facebook, a newsletter and so on. Clicks on Google, Microsoft, TikTok, X and LinkedIn ads show as paid sources, such as Google Ads.
- Referrers shows the exact website address that sent each visitor, such as
news.ycombinator.com. - Campaigns shows the UTM tags you've added to your links, for telling one ad, email or post from another.
Direct / None means the visitor's browser didn't say where they came from. They typed your address, used a bookmark, or clicked a link in an app or email that hides where it came from. On the Referrers tab, visits from links with a UTM source tag show here too, since their source comes from the tag.
Pages
- Top pages lists the pages people viewed most, with how many visitors and pageviews each had.
- Time on page is the average time between opening a page and opening the next one in the same visit. When a page is the last of a visit, there's no next page to measure to, so that view isn't counted. A page that's usually the last one people see may show "–".
- Entry pages are the first pages people landed on. Entries is how many visits started there, and its bounce rate is the share of those visits that left without going further. A high bounce rate on an entry page is worth a look.
- Exit pages are the last pages people viewed before leaving. Exits is how many visits ended there. Every visit ends somewhere, so a busy exit page isn't a problem in itself; a checkout page with many exits might be.
Locations
The country and region each visitor is in, worked out from their IP address, which is never stored. Foresite never looks up anything more precise than a region, such as a city.
Devices
The browser, operating system and kind of device each visitor uses: Desktop, Mobile or Tablet.
Share
The percentage beside each row is its share of all your unique visitors in the period. If 300 of your 1,000 visitors came from Google, Google shows 30%.
On the Pages panel, shares can add up to more than 100%, because one visitor can view several pages.
Goals and custom events
- Custom events lists each event your site sends, such as signups, with how many visitors triggered it and how many times it happened in all. Events can be higher than visitors, because one person can do something more than once.
- Goals are the pages or events you've marked as a success in Settings → Goals. Conversion is the share of all your visitors who reached the goal: if 1,000 people visited and 25 signed up, that's 2.5%.
- Revenue adds up the amounts sent with events, in your site's currency.
Filters
Click any row, such as a page, a country or a source, to filter the whole dashboard by it. Click it again to remove the filter.
Every number then counts only the matching traffic. Filtering by a page shows visits that included that page, so Visits, Bounce rate and Visit duration describe those whole visits, not just the time on that page.
What's not counted
Bots, your own excluded browsers and floods of traffic from one visitor or network are filtered out before anything is stored, so they never appear in any of these numbers. Visitors whose ad blocker blocks the Tracking Script aren't counted either. Many ad blockers block analytics scripts by their address, which a custom domain avoids.