Metrics explained

This article defines the core metrics precisely, so you know exactly what each number counts. For a lighter overview of where they appear, see Understanding your dashboard.

Unique visitors vs pageviews vs sessions

These three are easy to confuse, so it helps to hold them apart:

• Pageview — one page load. Every time a page is rendered, that's a pageview. Reloading the same page counts again.
• Session — one continuous visit by one person. A session groups together the pageviews and events a visitor produces in a single sitting. When the visitor comes back later, that's a new session.
• Unique visitor — one distinct person, counted once no matter how many sessions or pageviews they generate in the range.

So for a single visitor who lands, reads three pages, leaves, and returns an hour later to read one more, you'd see 1 visitor, 2 sessions, and 4 pageviews.

How a visitor is recognized depends on the site's tracking mode. In cookieless mode the identifier rotates daily, so someone returning tomorrow counts as a new visitor. In cookie mode the same person is recognized across days.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that contained only a single pageview — the visitor arrived and left without going any further. It's computed per session, not per visitor. A high bounce rate can signal a weak landing page, or it can simply mean the page answered the question in one view.

Views per visit and session duration

• Views per visit is pageviews divided by sessions — the average number of pages seen in a single visit.
• Session duration is the average length of a session. Very short single-page sessions pull it down; deep multi-page visits pull it up.

Previous-period comparison

Every topline metric is shown against the equivalent previous period, so a percentage delta tells you whether it's rising or falling. The comparison period always matches the length of the current one: the last 7 days compares against the 7 days before that, this month against last month, and so on. A custom range compares against the immediately preceding span of the same length.

A positive delta means the metric grew versus the previous period; a negative delta means it shrank. For metrics where lower is better — bounce rate, for example — read the direction accordingly.

No sampling

Every metric is computed from your complete event history. Clickbase never samples or estimates, so the numbers you see are exact counts, not projections. See Data retention.