What every number means
Exact definitions for bounce rate, sessions, channels and goals.
Sessions and session time
A session is one visit. It starts when someone arrives and continues while they keep doing things. Session time is the total of the gaps between their actions, and any gap longer than thirty minutes is treated as them having left rather than as time spent reading.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. Measuring a session from its first action to its last would count a tab left open over lunch as a two hour visit, and one such visitor is enough to move your average for the whole day.
Session time is averaged over visits with more than one action. A visitor who lands and leaves has no second moment to measure from, so counting them as zero seconds would drag the average down to describe something that was never measured.
Bounce rate
A bounce is a visit with a single page view. Bounce rate is the share of visits that bounced.
A high bounce rate is not automatically bad. A documentation page that answers the question on first read will bounce almost every visitor, and that is the page working. Read it against entry pages: a bounce on your pricing page means something quite different from a bounce on a blog post.
Channels
Every visitor is assigned one channel from their first visit, based on the referrer and any UTM tags on the link.
| Channel | What lands here |
|---|---|
| Direct | No referrer and no campaign tags: typed, bookmarked, or from an app |
| Organic search | Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Brave |
| Organic social | X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Hacker News, Product Hunt |
| AI assistants | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot |
| Paid | Any link tagged with a paid, cpc or ppc medium |
| Referral | Every other site that linked to you |
AI assistants are separated from search on purpose. They behave nothing alike: the traffic is smaller, it converts differently, and it does not respond to the things that move search rankings. Averaged into one bucket, that difference disappears.
Entry and exit pages
The entry page is the first page of a visit and the exit page is the last. Top pages counts every page view regardless of position.
Exit pages are the most useful of the three and the least looked at. A page appearing far more often as an exit than its traffic would suggest is a page where people give up.
Goals
Anything you send through track() appears under Goals, counted by distinct people rather than by total fires. Ten clicks from one frustrated visitor is not ten conversions.
Nothing needs configuring first. Send the event and it shows up.
Asking instead of reading
Ask reads the same computed results the dashboard renders, so anything here can be asked in plain English: which page loses the most visitors, whether a bounce rate is a problem, which source converts best.
Answers arrive with the evidence attached, and sometimes with a small chart. Charts are checked value by value against the data they cite, and any chart containing a number that is not in your data is discarded rather than shown.