Visitors

The Visitors tab. The first question anybody asks about something they had built, and one you should never have to wire anything up to answer.

What it shows#

• Visitors today.
• Visitors and pages over a period.
• A daily average.
• A day-by-day chart.
• The most-opened pages.

Separately for test and live, because a busy round of testing is not customers using it.

Nothing to set up#

Every deployed application reports its own page views. There is no script to add, no account to create and no snippet to paste. It works from the first deployment.

Counted without identifying anyone#

A visitor is a one-way daily hash of address and browser, salted with a secret. It cannot be reversed into an address, and it does not carry from one day to the next or from one application to another.

So there is no identifier stored, no cookie set, and nothing to put a banner up about.

The daily count uses a technique that holds a constant amount of memory regardless of traffic, at about one per cent error. That is well inside what "roughly how many people" means, and it is why this costs nothing to run.

What is not counted#

Asset requests, API calls and crawlers. What you see is people opening pages.

What this is not#

It is not product analytics. There are no funnels, no cohorts, no per-person journeys — and there cannot be, because nothing identifies a person.

If you need to know what individual users do, that is something the application itself records, deliberately, as part of what it does — and it becomes your data, with your obligations attached to it.