Concepts
Visits, not sessions
Section titled “Visits, not sessions”A visit is one row. Hits from the same visitor within 30 minutes of inactivity extend the same visit, updating its entry page, exit page, pageview count, bounce flag and duration. After 30 minutes of silence the next hit starts a new visit.
The six metrics
Section titled “The six metrics”| Metric | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Visitors | Distinct anonymous visitor ids in the period |
| Visits | Number of visits |
| Pageviews | Number of pageview events |
| Views per visit | Pageviews divided by visits |
| Bounce rate | Share of visits with a single event |
| Visit duration | Time between a visit’s first and last hit |
Visitors
Section titled “Visitors”A visitor id is HMAC(site | IP | user agent) keyed with a salt that changes every UTC day. The id exists only to group hits within a day. Because the salt rotates, a visitor cannot be matched from one day to the next, so Visitors over a long period is a sum of daily uniques and slightly overstates real people. See How it works.
Events and goals
Section titled “Events and goals”A pageview is an event named pageview. Anything else (a signup, a download) is a custom event you send with plausible('Name'). Create a goal for an event or a page to see conversions.
Realtime
Section titled “Realtime”The realtime period shows the last 30 minutes minute by minute. Current visitors, shown beside the site name, counts distinct visitors with activity in the last five minutes.
A site is a domain you measure. Every report is scoped to one site, and the dashboard for a site lives at /{domain}. Visits are stored per site, and a leading www. is ignored when matching a domain.