The dashboard
Reading your numbers: intervals, comparisons, timezones, and every breakdown explained.
The layout
A site's overview reads top to bottom: the headline totals (visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, average visit), the traffic chart, then the breakdowns: pages, sources, geography, devices and custom events. Every number answers the range picked in the header, and every breakdown is the same range cut a different way.
Tag your own links
Browsers send less and less referrer information every year, and some places send none at all — a link in a newsletter, a PDF, a chat app or an app's in-built browser usually arrives with nothing attached, which is why so much traffic reads as Direct. Adding a ref to the link fixes that, and there is nothing to turn on: if a visit arrives with no referrer of its own, the tag names the source.
https://example.com/?ref=twitter
https://example.com/pricing?ref=newsletter- Known names are folded onto the site they mean, so ?ref=twitter lands in the same row as the visits X reports itself. A domain works too: ?ref=selfh.st.
- Anything else is kept exactly as you wrote it, so ?ref=newsletter is its own row in Sources, useful for the places that have no domain at all.
- A referrer the browser did send always wins. The tag only fills in what would otherwise be Direct, so a leftover ?ref on your own internal links cannot invent a visit.
?ref=producthuntto every outbound link, and so do most launch boards, directories and newsletters — those visits stop reading as Direct on their own. ref and UTM tags answer different questions and do not compete: utm_source and its companions are their own cuts of the Sources card, for campaigns you are running and measuring, while refis a light way to name where a single link lives. A link may carry both. Tagging is only read going forward — it cannot relabel visits that already happened.Ranges and comparisons
- The interval picker covers today, yesterday, the last 7 and 30 days, month and year views, 6 and 12 months, and All time (anchored at your site's first event).
- Comparisons show the preceding equal-length period beside the current one, so a delta is always against something concrete.
- The chart picks its own grain honestly: hours for a day, days for a month, ISO weeks for 6 and 12 months. Weekly unique visitors are merged server-side, never summed from days, so uniques stay true.
Whose clock cuts the day
Charts follow your account timezone (or your browser's, until you pick one), so Today means your today. Widgets and public share pages have their own rules; the timezones page lays out all three clocks.
Sessions and engagement
A session is rebuilt server-side with a 30-minute inactivity rule; bounce rate and average visit duration come from it. Engagement time is measured with two clocks (visible time, and active time near a real interaction), so a tab parked in the background does not inflate anything.