Documentation
What each number means
Unique visitors, page views, bounce rate, sources — defined by how they are actually computed.
Analytics tools disagree about what a “visit” is, which is why two of them never show the same figure. These are the definitions Inqetra uses, stated as how they are actually computed rather than as what they are supposed to represent.
Page views
Every page view the tracker records, including client-side route changes in a single-page app. Not deduplicated: a reader who reloads twice counts twice, because they did look at the page twice.
Unique visitors
Distinct people within the period, where a person is a hash of their address, their browser and a salt that rotates at midnight UTC.
The consequence worth knowing: the same person visiting on two days counts as two visitors over a range covering both. Not a bug — the architecture destroys the means to link them, deliberately, which is what lets the product ship without a consent banner.
Bounce rate
The share of sessions that reached exactly one page. A session is the visitor plus the thirty-minute window they were active in, so a later visit the same day starts a new one — with no server-side session store to keep.
Active now
Distinct visitors seen in the last five minutes, and what they are reading. Always answered from the hot store on every plan, because the alternative lands on a roll interval and would be stale by construction.
Sources
Every referrer is classified at the edge into one of 5 channels, from the referring domain:
- Direct
- No referrer at all — typed, bookmarked, or arrived from somewhere that sent none.
- Search
- The referring domain is a search engine.
- Social
- The referring domain is a social network.
- The referring domain is a webmail host. Checked before Search, because mail.google.com is a mailbox rather than a search result.
- Referral
- A referrer that matched none of the above — another site linked to you.
The point of grouping is arithmetic the raw list hides. Six networks at three per cent each look like noise until they add up to eighteen.
Worth knowing
Every total is weighted by the sample interval before you see it. Above roughly a million writes a minute the store samples, and an unweighted sum would return a number that is quietly too low — how Inqetra counts sets out why that is built into the query rather than left to whoever writes one.