What We Do Not Offer

Metrics that require linking requests to individual visitors — unique visitors, session paths, bounce rate, and funnel tracking — are not available. The design produces aggregate counts only.

Unique visitors

A unique visitor count requires a way to determine that two requests came from the same person. Without a persistent identifier — a cookie, a fingerprint, a login token — there is no reliable way to make that determination. This system assigns no identifier and stores no cross-request link, so it cannot compute a unique visitor figure. The board shows total page views, which is a count of events, not a count of people.

For many operators, this is not a meaningful loss. Page views tell you how much your content was read. A page with 1,000 page views was read 1,000 times, regardless of whether those reads came from 200 people or 800 people. The relative ranking of pages by read count, and the change in that count over time, are the signals most content decisions require.

If your measurement framework depends on unique visitor counts — for example, if you report reach to advertisers, sponsors, or investors using that figure — you will need a supplementary tool that does track individuals, or you will need to adjust your reporting to use page views instead. This system will not produce a unique visitor figure because doing so correctly requires the identity mechanism that has been deliberately excluded.

Session paths and user journeys

A session path is the sequence of pages one person viewed in a single sitting. Understanding session paths requires connecting successive page-view events from the same visitor into an ordered list. That connection requires an identifier shared across those events, which this system does not create.

You cannot use the board to answer questions like "what page do people view after the homepage?" or "how many steps does a typical journey from blog post to signup take?" Those questions require session data. The board shows page-view totals for each path, but it does not show the order in which those paths were visited or which visitors moved between them.

If understanding the navigation flow between pages is important to your site's decisions — which it often is for e-commerce sites, onboarding flows, and conversion-driven landing pages — session path analysis is a genuine requirement. That analysis is not a feature of this system, and adding it would require introducing the session mechanism that was deliberately left out.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate in the traditional sense is the percentage of sessions in which the visitor viewed only one page and left. Computing it requires knowing that a given visit consisted of exactly one page view — which requires a session. Without sessions, bounce rate cannot be computed.

Some analytics tools define a simpler variant: a "bounce" is a page view with no subsequent tracked interaction within a time window. This system does not offer that variant either, because the time window comparison also requires linking the current request to a subsequent one from the same visitor.

The practical question behind bounce rate is usually "are people engaging with the site beyond the first page?" You can approach this question by comparing traffic between your entry pages and the pages that follow them in a logical reading path. If the entry page has substantially more views than the next page in the journey, a proportion of visitors are not continuing — but this comparison is directional, not a precise bounce metric.

Conversion funnels and goal tracking

Conversion funnel tracking measures what fraction of visitors who reach step A also reach step B, then step C. It is a sequential measurement that requires session-level identity: the system must know that the user who was on step A is the same user who reached step B. Without that knowledge, you can count how many times each step was visited but not how many people completed the sequence.

Goal tracking — recording that a specific action, such as a form submission or a button click, occurred — can be done without full identity if the goal is just a page view for a confirmation page. But attributing that conversion back to a traffic source or a prior page view requires linking the confirmation event to the earlier events in the same session, which again requires a session identifier.

If your site's primary measurement need is conversion optimization — testing variations, attributing conversions to sources, measuring funnel drop-off — this system will give you raw page-view counts for each step but not the connected sequence data that funnel analysis requires. The help article on who this is not for covers these use cases in more detail.

Troubleshooting

If you expected to find a metric here and cannot locate it, check the vocabulary article first. Some terms used in other analytics tools map to different concepts in a stateless system, and what appears to be a missing feature may simply be presented under a different name or in a different form on the board.

If you need unique visitor counts for a specific purpose — a report to a partner, a grant application, an audience estimate — page views are a reasonable upper-bound proxy. A single person viewing three pages contributes three page views. The page-view total will be equal to or larger than the true unique visitor count, making it a conservative upper bound when used as an audience estimate.

If you find that the aggregate counts the board provides are not sufficient for the decisions your site requires, the who-it-is-not-for article outlines the use cases where a different analytics approach is likely to serve you better. Choosing the right tool for the job is the most important decision, and that article is written to help you make it clearly.