Traffic and Sources

Alongside your headline numbers, Analytics breaks down where your visitors came from, what they used and which pages they looked at.

Traffic Sources

Traffic Sources groups arrivals by the site that sent them — a search engine, a social network, another business linking to you.

Anyone who arrives without a referring site is grouped as Direct. That covers more than people typing your address: bookmarks, links opened from a messaging app or a PDF, and visitors whose browser or privacy settings withhold the referrer all land here. A large Direct share is normal and does not mean the rest is being measured wrongly.

Top Pages

Top Pages ranks your pages by visits, so you can see what is actually drawing attention rather than what you expect to.

Audience

Devices, Browsers and Top Countries describe who is visiting. Location is worked out from the visitor's connection at country and city level.

Automated traffic is left out

Search-engine crawlers, monitoring tools and other automated visitors are identified and dropped before anything is recorded. Your numbers are people, not hits.

This is worth knowing if you compare these figures against another tool: a raw hit count is usually higher, because much of what it counts was never a person.

What is not recorded

Analytics does not put a cookie on your visitors' devices and does not keep their IP addresses. A visitor is recognised by a fingerprint worked out fresh each day, which is what lets the same person be counted once instead of once per page they read.

That fingerprint is deliberately built so it cannot follow anyone. 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.

What that means for your numbers

Because the fingerprint is new each day, a visitor who comes back on Tuesday is not recognised as the person who came on Monday.

So over a single day, unique visitors means what you would expect. Over a week or a month it counts a returning customer on each day they came, which makes it closer to "how much visiting happened" than to a headcount of individual people. It is a sound number for comparing one week against another, and the wrong number for claiming how many separate people saw your site this month.