Understand how Analyze and Optimize calculate usage for insights and billing.
Analyze and Optimize use sessions and page views to help you understand how visitors engage with your site and measure site performance. These metrics also directly impact your add-on plan’s usage, so it’s important to know how they’re counted and where to monitor them.
How sessions and page views are counted
Sessions — a session represents a period of continuous activity by a unique visitor. For example, if someone visits your site, browses a few pages, and then leaves, that’s counted as one session. If that same visitor returns after being inactive for 30 minutes or more, a new session begins.
Page views — a page view is recorded any time a visitor loads a site page. This metric reflects the total number of pages viewed, regardless of how many visitors there are. For example, if one visitor views five pages, that counts as five page views.
Good to know
Analyze and Optimize filter out bot traffic using internal heuristics and detection logic, so your session and page view counts reflect actual human engagement. Filtered bot activity doesn’t count toward your plan limits.
How to track your site usage
You can see your session and page view usage by going to Site settings > Site usage. From there, you can review:
- Your current plan limits
- Your monthly usage to date
- When the billing period starts and ends
- Historic data using the date picker
What happens if you exceed your plan limits
Analyze and Optimize include surge protection to prevent overages caused by temporary traffic spikes. Here’s how it works:
First overage — if your site exceeds its monthly allotment for one billing month, you’ll receive notifications — but you won’t be charged. This grace period gives you time to assess your usage and make changes if needed.
Second consecutive overage — if your site exceeds its monthly allotment again for the following billing month, your add-on will automatically upgrade at the start of your next billing month. The upgrade is based on the lower sessions or page views usage from your last two billing months.