Filter Impact
The filter-impact panel in the collapsible drawer shows how many visits were accepted and how many were dropped at each filter stage during the current billing cycle. It is the clearest way to see how your filter settings are affecting what gets counted.
The four filter stages
Every beacon that arrives at the collector passes through four filter stages in sequence. If it is rejected at any stage, the rejection is counted in the corresponding drop category and the beacon is not added to your daily aggregates. The filter-impact panel shows the result of each stage: how many visits were accepted into the count, how many were dropped as bots or agents, how many were dropped by the country allowlist, how many were dropped by the event-limit governor, and how many were dropped because the quota cap was reached.
The stages run in order. A bot-drop happens before country check. A country drop happens before event-limit check. An event-limit drop happens before quota check. This means the counts in the panel are not overlapping — a single beacon appears in exactly one row: either accepted or one of the four drop categories.
The filter-impact panel always shows cycle totals, not range totals. Even if you have the board range set to "last 7 days," the filter-impact numbers reflect the full billing cycle from its start. This is because quota consumption is tracked at the cycle level, and the panel is primarily a quota diagnostic tool.
Counted visits
The first row of the filter-impact panel shows counted visits — the beacons that passed all four stages and were added to your daily aggregates. This number should match the cycle total shown in the This cycle tile on the period-compare panel. If the two numbers do not match, reload the board to get the latest state.
Counted visits are the only ones that appear in the chart, the pages table, the referrers table, the countries card, and all other board tiles. Dropped visits do not appear in any of those places. The filter-impact panel is the only place where dropped visits are visible.
Bot and agent drops
The bot-or-agent drop category counts beacons that were rejected because the User-Agent header matched the bot filter pattern. The filter checks for common bot, crawler, spider, scan, and scripted-request keywords in the User-Agent string. Requests with an empty User-Agent are also dropped as bots.
A high bot-drop count is normal for sites with good search engine visibility. Search engine crawlers, uptime monitors, and security scanners all generate beacon-like requests. Because the script runs in the browser, most crawlers do not execute JavaScript and do not send beacons at all — so the bot drops you see are from the minority of automated tools that do run JavaScript.
If the bot-drop count seems low relative to what you would expect, that is also normal. Most bots do not execute the script at all. The bot filter is a safety net for the ones that do.
Country allowlist drops
Country allowlist drops count beacons that were rejected because the request originated from a country not on your allowlist. If you have not configured a country allowlist, this row will show zero — all countries are accepted by default.
If you have activated the allowlist, this row shows you how much traffic you are excluding. A large country-drop count combined with a lower cycle count than expected may indicate that your allowlist is excluding more traffic than you intended. Review your Filters settings to confirm the correct countries are listed.
Event-limit and quota drops
Event-limit drops count beacons that were rejected because a single IP address sent more than the per-minute request limit. This governor exists to prevent a single automated source from consuming your quota. Real visitor traffic on a typical website does not trigger the event limit. If you see a significant event-limit drop count, investigate the Referrers card for a referrer host that correlates with the spike.
Quota drops count beacons that were rejected because the billing-cycle cap had been reached. Quota drops accumulate from the moment your cycle count hits the cap until the cycle resets. If quota drops are non-zero, your site is generating more real page views than your plan covers for this cycle. Widening your plan or waiting for the next cycle are the two options.
Troubleshooting
If quota drops are showing but you believe your traffic is legitimate and within what you paid for, check the event-limit drop count. A high event-limit count means a rate-limited source consumed some visits, and the quota cap may have been reached earlier than it would have otherwise.
If all four drop categories show zero and counted visits is also zero, the script has not sent any accepted beacons this cycle. Check the script-health indicator and the no-data-yet article.