Understanding Your Analytics Numbers

This page explains what the numbers in your analytics panel actually mean. You do not need any of it to read a traffic graph, but it answers the questions that come up once you start looking closely — especially “why doesn’t this match my other analytics tool?”

Visitors, Visits, and Pageviews

These three count different things, and mixing them up is the most common source of confusion.

Imagine one person who opens your home page, reads your pricing page, leaves for lunch, comes back two hours later, and looks at your contact page.

Pageviews: 3 — three pages were loaded.
Visits: 2 — the lunch break was long enough to end the first session.
Unique visitors: 1 — it was one person all along.

So for any period, visitors ≤ visits ≤ pageviews.

What Counts as a Visit

A visit — also called a session — is a run of activity with no gap longer than 30 minutes.

If someone is inactive for more than 30 minutes and then does something on your site, that starts a new visit. If they come back after 25 minutes, it is still the same visit. A visit has no maximum length: someone who keeps reading for three hours is having one long visit, not six.

A visit is counted on the day it started, so a session that runs past midnight is not split in half between two days’ totals.

How Bounce Rate Is Calculated

A bounce is a visit where someone viewed a single page and did nothing else at all — no second page, and no interaction with the one page they landed on.

This matters because a visitor who reads one long page carefully, clicks something on it, and leaves satisfied is not counted as a bounce. Bounce rate is measuring “arrived and did nothing”, not “only read one page”.

A lower bounce rate is usually better, but there is no universal target. What matters is whether it moves when you change something.

How Visit Duration Is Measured

Visit duration is the time between the first and last activity in a visit, averaged across all visits in the period.

Because it is measured between recorded actions, a bounce has a duration near zero — there is only one action to measure from. A page where people read for a long time without clicking still registers time, because the site quietly reports that someone is still there.

How Visitors Are Counted Without Cookies

Landingsite sets no cookies and stores nothing on your visitor’s device. Instead, each visit is given an anonymous fingerprint calculated from the visitor’s network address, their browser, your website, and a secret value that changes every day.

The result is a one-way code. It cannot be turned back into an address or a person, and it cannot be matched against the same visitor on any other website.

Two consequences follow, and they are the reason this page exists.

Unique visitors deduplicates within a day, not across days

Because the secret changes daily, the same person gets a different anonymous code tomorrow, and there is no way to tell the two apart — by design, because the old secret is destroyed.

So someone who visits on Monday and comes back on Tuesday is counted once on each day, and twice in any period covering both.

If Monday shows 100 unique visitors and Tuesday shows 100, then Last 7 days will show 200 for those two days, even if every single person came back on both. Over a longer period, the unique-visitors figure is effectively daily unique visitors, added up.

The practical reading:

Within a single day, unique visitors means what you expect: one person, counted once, no matter how often they return that day.
Over a week or a month, treat it as a measure of daily reach rather than a headcount of distinct people. It will be higher than the number of real individuals, by however much your audience returns on different days.
Do not read the 30-day figure as “how many different people discovered my site this month”. It is closer to the sum of thirty daily audiences, and a loyal audience inflates it more than a casual one.

This is the cost of counting people without following them around, and it is a trade we have made deliberately. A tool that reports true unique people over a month is, necessarily, one that can recognise a device a month later.

We cannot tell you about returning visitors

For the same reason, there is no “new vs returning” report. Recognising a returning visitor over weeks or months requires storing an identifier on their device — which is exactly what a cookie banner exists to ask permission for.

Why These Numbers Differ from Google Analytics

They will differ, usually with Landingsite reporting more traffic. This is expected, and it is not a bug in either tool.

The main reason is ad blockers. A large share of people browse with a blocker or a browser that blocks third-party trackers by default, and those tools block Google Analytics and similar scripts by name. Landingsite’s analytics are served as part of your own website, so they are not on those block lists and keep counting visitors that other tools miss.

We can put a number on it, because we run both on our own site. Over a recent week, Landingsite counted 28% more visitors than a well-known privacy-focused analytics tool running on the same pages at the same time — and the two moved almost perfectly in step day to day. Pageviews ran about 24% higher, visits about 30%.

That gap is the traffic the other tool never saw. It is also why the shape of your data is the trustworthy part: both tools agreed on which days were busy and which were quiet, they simply disagreed on how many people that was.

Other differences to expect:

Definitions vary. “Session”, “bounce”, and “engaged session” mean slightly different things in every tool. Google Analytics 4, in particular, redefined bounce rate as the inverse of its own engagement metric, so the two bounce numbers are not comparable at all.
Time zones. Comparing a tool set to UTC against one set to your local time will shift traffic between days.
Bots. Tools differ in which automated traffic they discard.

The practical advice: pick one tool as your source of truth and watch the trend. Comparing absolute numbers between two analytics tools is rarely time well spent.

What Is Not Collected

No cookies, and nothing stored on the visitor’s device.
No IP addresses retained.
No tracking across other websites.
Nothing more precise than an approximate city.

This is why your site does not need a cookie banner for Landingsite’s analytics. If you add Google Analytics, an advertising pixel, or another third-party tool yourself, that tool’s own requirements apply.

Website Analytics — what each report shows and how to filter it.