Pageviews, visitors and sessions are three different questions
nogeek · Founder of webanalytics.run
The public counting rules behind webanalytics.run and why its numbers should not be forced to match another analytics product.
Analytics metrics look familiar, but their names are not universal formulas. Two products can observe the same site and report different values because they accept different events, identify visitors differently, or end sessions under different rules.
Pageview: was an accepted page view recorded?
A Pageview is an accepted pageview event after Site validation, host checks, privacy signals, bot policy, and input normalization. SPA navigation can create a Pageview without a full document reload. A blocked or rejected request is not silently estimated back into an exact event count.
Daily Visitor: how many short-lived pseudonyms appeared today?
Daily Visitors count distinct Site/day-isolated pseudonyms. Raw IP addresses are not stored, and the pseudonym is not reused across Sites or dates. This makes the metric intentionally different from a long-lived cookie identity.
One person using two browsers may count twice. Two people with indistinguishable signals may occasionally collide. A person returning on the next UTC day is a new Daily Visitor for that day. The label is therefore a useful approximation, not a claim to know natural persons.
Session: did accepted activity continue within the session window?
A Session groups accepted events according to the published inactivity and boundary rules. Changing those rules changes the number. Session totals are best used consistently inside one product rather than treated as a universal fact that every analytics system must reproduce.
Coverage belongs beside the number
The reporting data layer is statistical and can sample data. Counts and amounts use sampling-aware weighting, and queries are partitioned to reduce quality loss. Even then, a rare dimension may be absent and an individual event cannot be guaranteed retrievable.
For that reason, webanalytics.run distinguishes reporting estimates from exact usage metering and trusted revenue facts. Reports should show partial, stale, or estimated states instead of turning infrastructure limits into false precision.
Use these metrics to compare trends, pages, sources, and outcomes under stable rules. Do not use a superficial mismatch with another tool as proof that either one has discovered the one true visitor count.
nogeek · Founder of webanalytics.run