What the words in an analytics report mean, and how Vireo Analytics counts each one. Tools define some of them differently, which is often why two tools disagree about the same site.
Also called referer, referring site
The address of the page a visitor was on when they followed a link to yours. The browser passes it along with the request, unless the link, the app or the browser's privacy settings hold it back.
In Vireo
Vireo keeps the referrer's domain only, in lowercase and without www, so every page on news.example.com adds up as one referrer.
Clicking a referrer on the dashboard opens its own screen, with a daily chart and the posts it sent people to.
Visits that arrive with no referrer. Someone typed the address or used a bookmark, or followed a link from somewhere that passes no referrer, such as an email client, a PDF or many mobile apps.
In Vireo
Vireo counts a visit as Direct when it has no referrer at all. Direct is one of the six groups in Where visitors come from.
A large Direct share usually means links from apps and email, because those visits can't be traced to anywhere else.
Also called organic search, search traffic
Visits from unpaid search results: someone searched, saw your page in the results and clicked it.
In Vireo
Vireo groups visits from search engines under Search, including the Google app on Android. A click on a search ad comes from the same search engine address, so it lands in Search too. Tag ad links with UTM parameters and Vireo Pro reports them as their own campaign.
Search engines keep the search itself private. To see what people searched for, connect Search Console, and Vireo stores the searches behind each post in your database.
Visits from links on other websites that aren't search engines or social networks: a blog post that mentions you, a directory, a forum thread.
In Vireo
Referral is the group for every site that isn't a search engine, social network or AI assistant. Each referring domain is listed with its pageviews and visitors, and filtering by Referral lists them all.
Also called social referrals
Visits from links shared on social networks, communities and chat apps.
In Vireo
Vireo puts social networks and communities under Social, including Hacker News, Product Hunt, Slack, Discord and Mastodon instances. Common Android apps such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Reddit, Slack and Telegram show by name.
The preview card a social network builds when someone shares your link is a bot fetch, not a visit. Vireo counts it among the bots as a link preview.
Also called AI referral traffic
A visit from someone who followed a link inside an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, usually a source the assistant cited in its answer.
In Vireo
Vireo recognises ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok, Mistral, Poe, You.com, Phind and Meta AI by the address of the link the reader followed, and groups those visits under AI assistants.
The AI assistants card sets those readers against the pages the same companies' crawlers took, as crawler requests per reader sent.
Also called UTM tags, campaign tags
Tags added to the end of a link, such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, that say which newsletter, ad or post a visit came from. They let you tell campaigns apart when the referrer alone can't.
In Vireo
Vireo counts a page under its path with the query string dropped, so a tagged link and the plain link add up as one page.
The free plugin counts tagged visits under the referrer they came from. Vireo Pro reports them by source, medium and campaign, taken from the first page of a visit, and uses the same tags to trace store revenue.
Also called entry page
The first page someone sees when they arrive on your site. In marketing it also means a page built for one campaign, but in analytics it's wherever a visit starts.
In Vireo Vireo Pro
Vireo Pro lists Top entry pages, the pages visits started on, and shows revenue by landing page: the page each buyer arrived on first, with orders, revenue and the share of visitors who landed there and bought.
Also called page view, view
One page loaded and seen by one person. Reloading the page counts again.
In Vireo
Vireo counts a pageview for each page a person sees. A page opened in a background tab counts once it becomes visible, and pages a browser prefetches or prerenders without anyone looking aren't counted.
One visitor counts for at most 5 views of the same page and 50 views in total a day. Views past that are reported among the bots, so a script reloading one page can't inflate your numbers.
Also called visitor, unique user
One person, counted once however many pages they see. Tools tell visitors apart with a cookie, a login or a fingerprint of their connection, and over how long a window decides the number.
In Vireo
Vireo combines the visitor's IP address and browser with a secret that changes every day, and keeps only a scrambled result. Within a day, Visitors is a true unique count.
Over a longer range, Visitors is the sum of each day's visitors, labelled "daily uniques, summed". Someone who comes on three days counts three times. Vireo can't tell you unique people per month, and doesn't print a number that pretends to.
Also called visit
A run of pageviews by one visitor, usually ended by 30 minutes without activity. A session-based tool reports how many sessions a page or source started, and their length.
In Vireo
Vireo doesn't count sessions. It counts pageviews, and visitors per day.
Vireo Pro's live view shows each current visitor's trail of pages, how long they've been on the site and when they were last seen. That activity is deleted after 30 minutes.
Also called crawler traffic, non-human traffic
Requests made by software rather than people: search engine crawlers, SEO tools, uptime monitors, link preview fetchers, scrapers and scripts. On many sites it outnumbers the readers.
In Vireo
Vireo keeps over 800 known bots out of your pageviews and visitors, matched by user agent, along with requests that send no user agent and browsers driven by testing tools. On Cloudflare it also leaves out requests Cloudflare marks as a verified bot, challenges or scores as a likely threat.
Bots are recognised when they ask WordPress for a page, before any JavaScript runs. They're reported under the totals by kind, so you can see what was left out.
Also called AI bot, AI scraper
A bot run by an AI company. Some collect pages to train models, some build the index an AI search tool answers from, and some fetch a page when a user asks an assistant about it.
In Vireo
AI crawlers are one of the kinds of bot Vireo keeps out of your numbers. It counts their requests, and the AI assistants card sets them against the readers AI assistants sent back.
On a site with full-page caching, a cached page is answered before WordPress runs, so the real number of crawler requests is higher than Vireo can see.
Also called average time on page, engagement time
How long a reader spent on a page. Older tools worked it out from the gap between one pageview and the next, which leaves the last page of every visit at zero. Newer ones measure it in the browser.
In Vireo
Vireo measures how long the page was in front of the reader. The clock pauses while the tab is in the background, and 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 is left out rather than counted as zero seconds. Vireo started recording time on page in version 0.13.0.
The share of visits that saw one page and left without viewing another. Tools differ in what they count as a visit, so the same site can show different bounce rates in two tools.
In Vireo
Vireo's bounce rate is the share of a day's visitors who viewed exactly one page. 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. Imported days have no bounce rate.
Also called exit page
The share of a page's views that were the last page of a visit. A high exit rate on a checkout step is a problem; on a thank-you page it's expected.
In Vireo Vireo Pro
Vireo doesn't report an exit rate per pageview.
Vireo Pro lists Top exit pages, where visits ended, and marks a page "high exit" when the visits ending there come to more than 80% of the visits that started there.
Also called conversion goal
An action you count as a success: reaching a thank-you page, signing up, clicking through to a partner. Each time someone does it is a completion.
In Vireo Vireo Pro
In Vireo Pro, a goal is a page visit (a path, with wildcards), an event your site sends, or an outbound click to a host. A goal can carry a value credited to each completion.
Before saving, a preview runs the pattern over the last 30 days so you can check it matches what you expect.
Completions of a goal divided by the visitors or visits that could have completed it. Whether it counts people or events changes the number.
In Vireo Vireo Pro
Vireo Pro's goal Rate counts people, not events: the share of visitors who completed the goal, so it never goes over 100%.
On the revenue screen, each landing page has a conversion rate: the share of visitors who landed there and bought.
A series of steps people take toward a goal, such as product page, cart, checkout and thank-you, counted step by step so you can see where they drop off.
In Vireo Vireo Pro
A Vireo Pro funnel chains goals in order. It counts people who completed one goal and then the next on the same day, and shows each step as a share of the one before and of the first.
Same day is the limit. Visitors are told apart with a secret that changes every 24 hours, so someone who starts today and finishes tomorrow can't be recognised as the same person.
Crediting a sale or conversion to the source that brought the buyer: a search, a newsletter, an ad. First-touch credits where they first arrived from, and last-touch credits the visit they bought on.
In Vireo Vireo Pro
Vireo Pro uses first touch. When a visitor first arrives it notes their source, medium, campaign, referrer and landing page, and a later order is matched to that visit. Without UTM tags, the source comes from the referrer.
A buyer can only be matched to a visit from the last 48 hours, because the daily secret that tells visitors apart is kept for two days at most. Someone who reads a post today and buys next week shows as direct.
Also called CWV
Google's three measures of how a page feels to use: how fast the main content appears (LCP), how quickly the page responds to a tap or click (INP), and how much the layout jumps while loading (CLS). Google grades each at the 75th percentile of visits.
In Vireo
Vireo measures all three in your real visitors' browsers and grades them Good, Needs work or Poor at the 75th percentile, the line Google uses. The card says how many visits were measured.
The same tab can run Google's PageSpeed Insights lab test on your homepage or any post. Vireo Pro adds a list of the slowest pages.
The time until the largest image or block of text in the first screen has drawn.
How long the page takes to show a response after someone taps, clicks or types, taken from the slowest interactions on the page.
In Vireo
Shown as Response to clicks. Good is 200 milliseconds or less, and over 500 milliseconds is Poor.
How much the content moves around unexpectedly while the page is open, such as text pushed down by an image or ad loading above it. It has no unit.
Also called cookie-free analytics
Counting visits without storing an identifier on the visitor's device. The tool tells visitors apart some other way, or doesn't try to.
In Vireo
Vireo sets no cookies and doesn't use local storage for tracking. It tells visitors apart within a day with a scrambled value built from the IP address, the browser and a secret that changes daily, and deletes those values after two days.
Visitors whose browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control aren't counted. A site that wants Vireo to wait for consent can turn that on with one filter.
Data you collect yourself, on your own site, from your own visitors and customers, as opposed to data bought from or held by another company.
In Vireo
Vireo's tracker sends each view to your own site, and the counts are stored in your WordPress database. Visitor data isn't sent to RebelCode or anyone else.
Analytics software that runs on a server you control, so the data stays where you put it instead of on the analytics company's servers.
In Vireo
Vireo is a WordPress plugin, so it runs on the server your site already uses. Daily totals are kept for as long as you set, two years by default, and can be exported as CSV.
Vireo Analytics is a free WordPress plugin. It counts visits without cookies, keeps bots out of your numbers and stores everything in your own database.
Get Vireo free on WordPress.org