Vocabulary

A short glossary of terms used in the dashboard and help articles, with plain definitions that match how this system actually works.

Page view, visit, and hit

A page view is one recorded load of a tracked page. When the script fires on a page, one page-view event is sent to the server and one tally is added to the counter for that path and date. If someone loads the same page three times, three page views are recorded. The term "visit" is sometimes used in the dashboard as a synonym for page view — they refer to the same thing here. A hit is another synonym with the same meaning in this context.

In session-based analytics tools, "visit" often means "session" — one person's continuous time on the site, possibly spanning multiple pages. In this system, that session meaning does not apply. Every page load is a visit. If you are coming from a tool that used "visits" to mean sessions, adjust your mental model: here, the visit count for a page is a raw page-load count, not a session count.

The daily visits-by-day chart shows the total of all page-view events recorded on each date in the selected range. It is the sum across all pages, not a per-page breakdown. Reading the chart alongside the page-by-page list gives you both the overall traffic level for the period and the distribution of that traffic across your content.

Resolution class and screen width

A resolution class is a label assigned to a visit based on the screen width reported by the visitor's browser at the time the script loads. The script reads that width, compares it to a set of defined thresholds, and sends the matching class label with the event. The most common class labels are phone, tablet, and desktop. The exact pixel thresholds for each class are documented in the script reference.

The raw pixel value is not stored. Only the class label travels in the event payload and is counted. This means you can see that 55% of visits come from phone-class screens without knowing the specific pixel widths of those screens or any other attribute that could help identify the device or the person using it.

When the board shows a resolution class breakdown, it shows the count of visits classified into each band for the selected date range. A visit is classified into exactly one class. The class counts add up to the total page-view count for the same period.

Referrer, direct, and source

The referrer is the URL from which a visitor navigated to your page. When a browser follows a link, it typically sends the referring page's URL in the HTTP Referer header. The script reads that header, extracts the domain portion, and sends it as the referrer value with the event. The board shows referrers as domain labels: a visit from a link on example.com would appear as example.com in the referrer list.

Direct traffic is the label for visits that arrive with no referrer. This covers people who typed your URL directly, followed a bookmark, or arrived from a source that deliberately strips the referrer header. Many email clients, messaging apps, and privacy tools strip referrers, so a meaningful portion of what is labeled "direct" may actually be traffic from those channels — it is just not attributable to a specific source.

Source is sometimes used as a broader term for the channel a visit came from, encompassing both the referrer domain and contextual labels like "search" or "social." In this dashboard, source and referrer are used interchangeably to mean the domain extracted from the HTTP Referer header. There is no automatic channel categorization. What you see in the referrer list is the domain as reported.

Board, dashboard, and site record

The board is the main analytics view: the table and charts you see when you open a site in the dashboard. It shows page views, referrers, resolution classes, and the daily trend for the date range you have selected. The board recalculates every time you change the date range or switch sites.

The dashboard is the broader application interface where you manage sites, adjust settings, and view each site's board. The dashboard contains the board, but also the navigation, the site selector, and the account settings area. When documentation refers to "opening the dashboard," it means opening the application. When it refers to "reading the board," it means looking at the analytics data for a specific site.

A site record is the data stored for one site: its name, its site key, its access keys, and its accumulated counts. When you add a site to your account, a site record is created. All the page-view events that match that site's key are stored under that record. Deleting the site record removes all its associated counts. Each site's counts are completely separate from every other site's counts.

Troubleshooting

If a term used in a help article is not in this glossary, check whether the article links to a more specific reference. The script reference covers terms specific to the tracking script, the privacy articles cover terms related to data handling, and the dashboard articles cover terms specific to the interface. This glossary covers the analytics vocabulary shared across all of those.

If a term you know from another analytics tool does not appear here, that term may not have a direct equivalent in this system. Unique visitor, session, bounce, conversion, and funnel are common terms from other tools that either do not apply or apply differently here. The what-we-do-not-offer article addresses the gap for the most common of these.

If you encounter inconsistent terminology between older articles and newer ones — for example, "visit" meaning session in one place and page view in another — please use the feedback link on the article to flag it. The definitions in this glossary are the canonical ones, and any inconsistency in article language is an error to be corrected.