How the numbers work

Visitors are worked out day by day

Crustat stores nothing on your visitors’ devices. Instead, it recognises a visitor within one day only, using a code that changes every day (see What Crustat collects for how). So there are no “returning visitors”: someone who comes back tomorrow looks the same as someone new, on purpose.

On 7 days and 30 days, the dashboard adds up each day’s visitors. One person who visits on three different days adds 3. Read weekly and monthly visitors as “daily visitors added up”, not as a strict headcount. For the same reason, visitors and visits are the same number in Crustat: one visitor on one day is one visit.

A person who switches network (Wi-Fi to mobile data) or browser during the day can show up twice that day, since the daily code is built from both.

Around midnight UTC

The daily code changes at midnight UTC, whatever your time zone. Someone on your site just before and just after that moment gets two codes, so they can appear twice in your local day. It only affects those few minutes.

What each number means

• Page views: every page opened, including in single-page apps.
• Bounce rate: the share of visits that saw exactly one page. Lower is better.
• Session time: the average time a visit spent with your pages open and in view. It’s worked out from visits whose browser reported the time when the visitor left, which most do. If none did, it shows ”–”.
• Online: people who opened a page in the last 5 minutes.

Comparisons are fair to the clock

Every number is compared with the same length of time just before, cut at the same time of day. At 3pm, Today is compared with yesterday up to 3pm. 7 days is the last 7 days up to now against the 7 before, and the same for 30 days.

Days and hours follow your time zone

“Today” starts at midnight in your site’s time zone, and the hours on the chart are that zone’s too. A site uses the workspace’s time zone (Workspace settings → General → Time zone) unless you pick another in Site settings → General → Time zone. With neither, it’s UTC. Change it any time: the Overview follows the new zone right away. Days already kept in History stay in the zone they had.

The hourly chart can add up to more than the total

On Today, each bar holds the visitors of that hour. Someone who visits at 9am and again at 2pm is in both bars, but only once in the day’s Visitors total. So the bars can add up to more than the headline number. The same goes for bounce rate and session time per bar: they can differ a little from the totals.

A minute’s delay

A new visit takes about a minute to show up. Events you set up on the Events tab start working on your site within about 5 minutes.

What’s left out

• Bots and copies of your site are kept out of every number. See How bots are kept out.
• Your own visits are in, unless you turn them off. See Ignore your own visits.
• Localhost is never recorded, so testing on your own computer doesn’t add anything.

Ranges, filters and history

• The Overview shows Today, 7 days or 30 days. There’s no custom date range there.
• History shows months and years, and lets you pick any dates up to 3 years at a time. See Look back further with History.
• The only filter is the domain, for sites on several addresses. You can’t narrow the stats by country, source or page; open the matching list instead.
• Detailed visits are kept for about 3 months. History keeps a daily summary for as long as the site exists. See How long your data is kept.