Traffic analytics plays a crucial role in understanding your website's performance through three key metrics: visits, pageviews, and unique visitors.

Key Performance Indicators

Unique Visitors:

• Estimated total number of actual visitors
• Tracked via two-year browser cookie
• Best metric for measuring loyal audience
• Resets when visitors clear cookies or use different browsers

Visits:

• Represents single browsing sessions
• Tracked via 30-minute browser cookie
• One person can have multiple daily visits
• Sessions automatically end at midnight
• Ideal for measuring site engagement

Pageviews:

• Counts actual page requests
• Includes all full page loads
• Covers not linked sections, collection items, and password-protected pages
• Excludes image URLs, scripts, and 404 pages

Analyzing Traffic Data

Line Graph Features:

• Shows trends over time
• Hover capability for specific dates
• Adjustable time scales
• Data available from January 2014

Traffic Breakdown

Visit Analysis Categories:

• Device type (mobile, computer, tablet)
• Traffic sources
• Browser types
• Operating systems

Special Considerations

Index Page Views:

• Sub-pages accessed from main index count toward index page
• Direct URL access counts toward individual sub-pages

Chrome's "Do Not Track" Impact:

• May inflate unique visitor and visit counts
• Each page view registers as new visitor
• View count remains accurate
• Primarily affects direct traffic metrics

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