Pageviews
One pageview for each page a person sees. A page opened in a background tab is counted when it becomes visible. Pages a browser prefetches or prerenders without anyone looking at them aren’t counted as views.
Pageviews are exact over any range.
A page is counted under its path. The part after # is dropped, and so is the query string, so /pricing/?ref=newsletter and /pricing/ add up as one page. A few WordPress parameters are kept because they name the page itself: page_id, p, tag, cat, product and attachment_id. An AMP version ending in /amp/ counts as the page it copies, and on a WordPress install in a subfolder the folder is left off. A developer can keep more parameters with the vireo_allowed_query_vars filter.
Visitors
Vireo combines the visitor’s IP address and browser with a secret that changes every day, and keeps only a scrambled result. That tells one visitor from another within a day, without cookies, and the result can’t be traced back to the address once that day’s secret is deleted.
So within one day, Visitors is a true unique count. Over a longer range it’s the sum of each day’s visitors: someone who came on three days in a month counts three times. The Visitors card says “daily uniques, summed” when the range is longer than a day.
“Unique people this month” is a question this privacy model can’t answer, and Vireo doesn’t print a number that pretends to.
Time on page
Time on page is how long a page was in front of the reader. The clock runs only while the tab is visible: switching to another tab or app pauses it, and coming back resumes it. The tracker reports the time when the reader leaves the page or switches away. Each view counts for at most 30 minutes.
The average covers only the views that reported a time. A view closed before it could report, or seen in a browser that never says the page was left, is left out rather than counted as zero seconds. Time is only accepted for a page the same visitor has a counted pageview on that day, so excluded and bot traffic adds none.
Vireo Analytics 0.13.0 started recording time on page. Earlier days, and days you imported from another tool, have none.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of a day’s visitors who viewed exactly one page. A visitor is counted the way the Visitors card counts them, once a day, so someone who reads one page on Monday and one on Tuesday is a bounce on both days. Over a longer range, each day’s visitors and bounces are added up before the share is worked out.
Bounce counting starts the day after you update to 0.13.0, because visitors who arrived earlier on the update day were already counted without it. On a new install it starts straight away. Imported days have no bounce rate.
Repeat views
One visitor counts for at most 5 views of the same page and 50 views in total per day. Anything past that is reported among the bots as “Repeated views past the daily cap”, so a script hammering one page can’t inflate your numbers.
Left out
- Visits from logged-in users with a role you’ve ticked under Settings, General, “Do not count”. Administrators are ticked by default. Users with any other role, such as editors, subscribers and customers, are counted unless you tick theirs too.
- Visits to
/wp-admin/*and/wp-login.php, plus any paths, IP addresses or countries you add. See Excluding traffic. - Bots, which are counted separately. See Bot filtering, which includes hits from known referrer-spam hosts.
- Automated browsers: ones that announce themselves through the flags testing tools set, even when they claim to be Chrome, and first visits of the day from a browser twelve or more major versions out of date with no outside referrer.
- Visitors whose browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
- Previews, feeds, robots.txt and trackbacks, which never load the tracker.
- Requests over the rate limit of 60 per minute from one address.
Why another tool shows more
Most analytics tools count some automated traffic as visitors: uptime monitors, SEO crawlers, AI crawlers and testing tools. Server-log tools count every request. Vireo keeps those out and shows what it removed under the summary cards, by category, so you can check the difference yourself.
Visitors also differ by definition. A tool that recognises someone across months reports fewer, larger “unique visitors” over a month than Vireo’s sum of daily counts.