First Visit

The first time you open the dashboard after pasting the snippet, a live page view confirms the install. Here is what the numbers mean and what to do if nothing appears.

The first beacon

When a visitor — including you — loads a page on your site after the snippet is installed, the script fires a beacon within milliseconds of the page's load event. That beacon reaches the StatelessID collector and is written to your site's daily total.

Open the dashboard shortly after your test visit. If you see a count of at least 1 under today's page views, the install is working. That first data point is the most important one to confirm — it tells you the snippet loaded, the key matched, and the network path between your site's visitors and the collector is open.

If you refreshed the page a few times while testing, each full reload fires a new beacon. Your first-visit count may be 3 or 4 rather than 1. That is fine — it means you successfully tested the install from multiple page loads.

Reading the initial dashboard numbers

The dashboard shows page views for the current day by default. Early in the day the numbers will be small. The column labeled Pages shows a breakdown of which URLs on your site received traffic. The Referrers column shows where those visitors came from — direct, a search engine, or another site.

The Devices column shows the screen resolution class of each visitor's device: small (phone-sized), medium (tablet-sized), large (desktop), or extra-large (high-resolution desktop). This is derived from screen.width, screen.height, and devicePixelRatio at the moment the beacon fires — no cookie, no fingerprint.

All columns are counts. There is no "unique visitor" number, no session ID, no user journey. The dashboard shows you what happened on your pages today — how many times pages loaded, which pages, where traffic came from, and what screen sizes appeared.

Nothing appeared after 5 minutes

Beacons typically appear in the dashboard within a minute of firing. If 5 minutes have passed and today's count is still zero, work through this checklist: (1) Confirm the snippet is on the live page, not just a local copy on your computer. (2) Open the page in a browser and check the Network tab in developer tools for requests to asset.js and /t/c. (3) Compare the data-k value in your snippet to the site key shown in your dashboard — they must match exactly.

A common mistake is installing the snippet on localhost or a local development server. Beacons from localhost are filtered out by the collector because localhost is not a real public origin. You need to test from the live URL.

Another common mistake is opening the dashboard for a different site than the one you installed on. If you have multiple site registrations, confirm the site selector in the dashboard is set to the site whose key you pasted in the template.

Understanding the day boundary

The dashboard counts resets at midnight UTC each day. If you installed the snippet late in the day (UTC) and your first test visit happened just before midnight, the count will appear under yesterday's date when you open the dashboard the next morning.

You can change the date range in the dashboard to view yesterday or a custom range if you suspect a day-boundary timing issue. Your data is not lost — it is just filed under the UTC date when the beacon arrived.

Going forward, the dashboard shows the selected date range's totals. For a new site, the best way to validate ongoing tracking is to check back after a day of real traffic and confirm the numbers match your rough expectations based on what you know about your site's audience.

Troubleshooting

The dashboard showed a count of 1 yesterday but today it is back to zero. The count resets each day at midnight UTC. Yesterday's 1 is preserved if you change the date selector to yesterday. Today starts fresh.

My own test visits are inflating my data. StatelessID does not filter out any IP addresses by default. If you test heavily during the install, you may see a small bump in that day's count. Those visits are real page loads from a real browser — your data accurately reflects all traffic, including your own.

The referrer for my test visit shows as blank. Direct navigation — typing the URL, opening a bookmark, or navigating from a browser history entry — produces a blank referrer. That is correct. The Referrers column will start filling in once visitors arrive from external links or search results.