Analytics Overview
The Analytics section shows how visitors interact with your website. It sets no cookies and doesn't follow anyone from one day to the next or from your site to anyone else's, which keeps what you need to tell visitors short. It isn't nothing, though: your privacy policy should say that you measure visits, what is recorded (listed below), and that Helm does this for you. Whether you also need to ask visitors' permission depends on the law where you and they are, and that's a question for your own adviser.
How visitors are counted
A visitor is recognised by an identifier made each day from their IP address and browser with a random key that is destroyed at the end of the day; the address itself isn't stored, and once the day is over the identifier can't be worked out from them again. That is what lets the same person be counted once instead of once per page they read. It changes every day, and it is specific to your site — the same person visiting another business's site is not connectable to their visit to yours. Separately, each visit gets a random identifier that is kept in the browser tab's session storage (not a cookie) and disappears when the tab closes; it only groups one visit's pages together. Nothing is stored on the visitor's device between visits, unless they choose not to be counted (below), and no cookie is set. A person who returns tomorrow is counted as a new visitor, because there is deliberately no way to recognise them.
That is a genuine trade. Your visitor numbers are slightly higher than a cookie-based tool would report, and in exchange far less is kept about each person: no cookie, nothing that lasts past the day, and nothing that connects your visitors to anyone else's site. It is still personal data in law, because a daily identifier is a pseudonym rather than anonymity. If a visitor is signed in to an account on your site, their visits also appear on their customer record.
What's tracked
Visits and visitors
- Page views — total visits to each page
- Visitors / day — distinct visitors each day, averaged over the range you choose. Someone who comes back on another day is counted again that day, so this is a daily figure, not a total of different people
- Top pages — which pages get the most attention
- Time on page and bounce rate — how long people stay, and how often they leave without going further
Where people came from
- Traffic sources — direct, or the website that linked to them
- Countries — with the strongest one called out on the summary
- Campaign tags — if you add
utm_source,utm_medium,utm_campaign,utm_termorutm_contentto a link you share, those are recorded, so you can tell an Instagram post from an email newsletter
What people did
- Clicks — on links and buttons, labelled by what they say
- Outbound clicks — when someone leaves for another website, and where they went
- Form submissions
- Scroll depth — how far down a page people actually get
- Time per section — which parts of a long page hold attention
Devices
- Device type, browser, and screen size
What isn't counted
Opening your own site from your dashboard isn't a visit: not the editor's Site preview, not its Open live site link, and not Visit site on your domain page. Nor are automated browsers, or pages a browser loads ahead of time that nobody ends up seeing.
Letting visitors choose not to be counted
A visitor can choose not to be counted on your site. Their browser then sends nothing at all: no page views, no clicks, no events. Browsers that send Global Privacy Control are treated the same way, without anyone having to ask.
The easiest way to offer the choice is a switch on your privacy page. Add this element wherever it should appear, and the switch draws itself in your page's own font and colours, in English or Arabic depending on your page's language:
<div data-helm-visits-toggle></div>
It never mentions Helm; it talks about "this site". If you'd rather build your own control, three calls do the same job:
window.helm.optOut()stops counting this browser on this site.window.helm.optIn()counts it again, from the next page.window.helm.optedOut()returnstruewhile this browser isn't counted.
The choice is kept in the visitor's browser for your site only, so it covers every page of your site in that browser and nothing else. It lasts until they switch it back on or clear their browser's storage, though some browsers, Safari among them, forget it after about a week without a visit. If your site answers at more than one address, the choice holds only at the address where it was made.
Live visitors
The Live view counts anyone on your site right now: browsers that have checked in recently, plus anyone who loaded a page in the last 90 seconds. A visitor's browser checks in every 30 seconds while the tab is open, so someone reading quietly still shows up.
Beneath the count you get the twenty most recent page views with the page and the country. On a busy site those are the last few minutes; on a quiet one they may reach back further, because it is the last twenty rather than the last hour.
It is the right place to watch while a campaign is going out.
Time ranges
Use the range picker for the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, all time, or a custom date range. Every figure on the page also shows how it compares with the previous period of the same length, so a 30-day view tells you how the last 30 days compare with the 30 before them.
Tracking your own events
If your site does something worth counting that is not a page view or a click — a booking started, a plan chosen, a video finished — you can record it yourself:
window.helm.track('booking_started', { plan: 'standard' })
The event name is required. The second argument is optional and takes up to 50 short properties. Events appear alongside everything else in your Analytics section.
What to look at first
If you are not sure where to start: top pages tells you what people actually came for, traffic sources tells you whether your effort is reaching anyone, and scroll depth on your busiest page tells you whether they read it. Those three answer most questions.