Understand where visitors come from and how Analyze measures site activity.
Knowing how people arrive at your site — and how their activity is measured — helps you make sense of your data and avoid surprises with usage limits. Analyze tracks both traffic sources and site usage so you can interpret trends with confidence.
Traffic sources in Analyze
Traffic source attributes show how visitors arrive at your site — for example, from search, social media, email campaigns, paid ads, or direct visits. Each visitor session is assigned a traffic source based on the most recent known touchpoint that led them to your site.
You can use traffic source data in Analyze to:
- Compare engagement across channels
- Spot trends in how visitors discover your site
- Understand shifts in performance when traffic sources change
Review our full breakdown of traffic sources to learn more.
Sessions vs. page views in Analyze
Analyze uses sessions and unique visitors to measure site activity and power reporting. At a high level:
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A session — represents a continuous period of activity by a visitor
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A unique visitor — an individual users who visit your site. A user may be counted more than once if they return using a different browser or device.
Analyze doesn't report on individual page views (each time a page loads). Instead, the "Site overview" page includes a "Top pages" metric, which ranks pages by the number of unique visitors whose session included that page. Keep in mind that sessions and page views aren't 1:1 — a single session can include multiple visits to the same page.