Stats

Stats in the top bar shows how the site is used: how many pages were viewed, by how many people, which links they followed, which sites sent them and which campaigns brought them. Editors and admins can see it.

The line under the heading says how visitors are counted on your site: without cookies, or with the Stats cookie (see How visitors are counted). Admins also see a Stats settings link there.

Choosing the dates

At the top right:

• Click 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or Year for the last that many days, up to today. Stats opens on the last 30 days.
• Or pick your own dates: choose From and To, then press Show. To can’t be later than today. A range can be up to 731 days long.

Every number, table and download on the screen is for the dates chosen. Days follow the site’s time zone.

The totals

Three tiles sum up the dates chosen:

• Page views: how many times pages were opened.
• Visitors: how many different people came. Without the Stats cookie, each person is counted once a day, so someone who visits on three days counts three times; the tile says Counted once a day each. With it, each person who has the cookie counts once for the whole range, and the tile says how many return visits there were.
• Links clicked: how many times people followed a link on the site, to another page, another site, a file, an email address or a phone number.

The chart

Page views a day has a bar for each day. Ranges over 90 days show Page views a week instead, a bar for each week.

• Point at a bar, or press Tab to move to it, to see that day’s (or week’s) views, visitors and clicks.
• The number at the top left is the tallest bar, and the dates under the chart are the first and last days.
• Show as a table lists the same numbers, newest first: Day (or Week), Views, Visitors and Clicks.

Before anything has been counted, it says “Nothing counted yet in this range.”

Pages

Every page that was viewed, with its Views and its Link clicks (links followed from that page). The count beside the heading says how many pages there are; the list shows up to the first 2,000.

• Click Views or Link clicks at the top of the list to sort by it. An arrow (↓) marks the one in use, and the sort is kept when you change the dates.
• Click a page’s address to open it in a new tab.

Links clicked

The links followed most, up to 100, with how many Clicks each had.

• Links to your own pages show as their address, such as /about/; links to other sites show the site and page and are marked another site.
• from 3 pages means the same link was clicked on several pages.
• Email addresses and phone numbers show as written.
• Anything after a ? or # in a link is left off, so the same link is counted together.
• Links that only jump within a page aren’t counted.

Where visits came from

The other sites that sent people here most, up to 15, with the number of Visits from each, such as a search engine or a social network. Moving from page to page on your own site isn’t counted here.

Visits typed in, from bookmarks or from many apps (such as email programs) don’t name a site, so they aren’t in this list.

Campaigns

Visits that came by a link tagged with a campaign, with their Campaign, Source, Medium and Visits. A part left out of the link shows as (none).

Tracking a campaign

To see how many visits a newsletter, an advert or a social media post brings, add utm_ tags to the link you share:

https://example.org/sale/?utm_campaign=spring-sale&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

• utm_campaign: the campaign’s name, such as spring-sale.
• utm_source: where the link is, such as newsletter, facebook or poster.
• utm_medium: the kind of link, such as email, social or print.

A link needs at least utm_campaign or utm_source to count as a campaign. Use the same words each time (all in small letters is easiest), so visits add up under one line. Free tools such as Google’s Campaign URL Builder make these links, and a QR code made from such a link tracks a poster or flyer.

Downloading the numbers

Each part has Download CSV: a file that opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, for the dates you are looking at. There is one for the chart’s days, the Pages list (in the order you sorted it), Links clicked, Where visits came from and Campaigns.

How visitors are counted

Each page has a small script that tells the site a page was viewed or a link was followed.

• Without the Stats cookie (the usual way), no cookie is set and no visitor’s address is kept. A visitor is recognised for one day only, by a scrambled code made from their connection and browser that is thrown away the next day, so each person counts once a day.
• With the Stats cookie, returning visitors are recognised across days. An admin turns it on and, where a cookie consent banner is used, it is set only for visitors who accept cookies (see The Stats cookie in the Admin guide).

What isn’t counted

• You, and anyone else signed in as an editor or admin. (Members signed in to their account are counted like any visitor.)
• Search engines and other machines that announce themselves as such.
• Previews, the admin screens, and pages that don’t exist (the “Not found” page).
• Visitors whose browsers don’t run the page’s script.

So Stats is a guide to how the site is used, not an exact count of every visit.

Numbers are kept for about 13 months (400 days), so a range further back than that shows nothing for the earlier days.