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 an identifier made each day from their IP address and browser with a random key that is destroyed at the end of the day, which is what lets the same person be counted once instead of once per page they read.

That identifier is built so it can't follow anyone from one day to the next. It changes every day, and it is specific to your site: the same person visiting another business's site can't be connected to their visit to yours.

What that means for your numbers

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

So your dashboard shows visitors per day: how many different people came on an average day in the range you choose. A customer who comes back on three days counts on each of those days, which is why there is no single "different people this month" figure — that number cannot be known without following people from day to day. Visitors per day is a sound number for comparing one week against another.

For the last 24 hours, 7, 30 or 90 days, the average is taken over whole days up to yesterday, because today is not over yet. A site whose first visitors came today shows today's figure so far.