Web Analytics
Web Analytics shows how visitors use your website: how many came, where they came from, which pages they looked at, and what they clicked.
It is built from the events that Autocapture sends, so the only setup is turning Autocapture on in the browser SDK. Open it from the Analytics section of the side menu.
- Turn on Autocapture in your website. Until page views arrive, the page shows No page views in this range yet.
- To fill the Clicks card, also turn on clicks with
autocapture: { clicks: true }. See Autocapture.
Pick what to look at
- Environment. Web Analytics shows one Environment at a time. Use the Environment switcher at the top of the page to change it.
- Date range. Pick any start and end date and time, or use a shortcut: Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days or This month. The default is the last 7 days, including today. Times are shown in the time zone of your browser.
- Refresh. Use the refresh button to load the latest numbers, or turn on auto refresh to reload every 30 seconds.
Filters
Filters narrow every number on the page to the visitors you care about.
- Add a filter with the Add filter button (the funnel icon) in the filter bar, or click a row in any breakdown to filter by that value. Click the row again to remove it.
- Edit or remove a filter from its chip, or remove them all with Clear.
- Several values of the same filter match any of them. Different filters must all match. For example, Country is India or Germany and Channel is Email.
- Filters are part of the page address, so you can share a filtered view with a link. Your last filters are also remembered when you come back.
You can filter by Path, Entry path, Exit path, Channel, Referrer, UTM source, UTM medium, UTM campaign, Device type, Browser, OS, Country, City, Language, Platform and Domain.
How a filter applies depends on what it describes:
- Session filters: Entry path, Exit path, Channel, Referrer and the UTM filters describe how a session started (or, for Exit path, how it ended). They keep whole sessions, with all of their page views.
- Page view filters: the others describe each page view. They keep the matching page views, and the sessions that include at least one of them.
Summary
The tiles at the top show the main numbers for the selected range:
| Metric | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Visitors | The number of different visitors, anonymous or signed in, that viewed at least one page. Each visitor is counted once in the range. |
| Page views | The number of $pageview events. |
| Sessions | The number of sessions that started in the range and include at least one page view. A session ends after 30 minutes without activity, or 24 hours after it started. |
| Session duration | The average time from the first to the last event of a session. Every event in the session counts, not only page views. |
| Bounce rate | The share of sessions with exactly one page view, no autocaptured clicks, and a duration under 10 seconds. |
Each tile also shows the change from the previous period: the range of the same length that comes right before the one you picked. Hover over the change to see the previous value. A lower bounce rate is shown as an improvement.
Trend
The chart shows Visitors, Page views or Sessions over the range: one point per hour for ranges of 48 hours or less, and one point per day for longer ones. A session is counted in the hour or day it started, so the points add up to the Sessions total in the summary.
Breakdowns
Each card has tabs, and each tab lists the top 20 values.
| Card | Tabs | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Paths | Top pages | Each page with its visitors, views and average time on page. |
| Entry pages | The first page of a session, with the number of sessions. | |
| Exit pages | The last page viewed in a session, with the number of sessions. | |
| Domain | The website domain the session was on, by sessions. Useful when one Environment tracks several websites. | |
| Sources | Channels | How the session arrived, by sessions. See Channels. |
| Referrers | The website the visitor came from, by sessions. Visits that did not come from another website are shown as (direct). | |
| UTM source, UTM medium, UTM campaign | The campaign tags on the landing page of the session, by sessions. | |
| Devices | Device type, Browser, OS | What visitors use, by sessions. |
| Platform | The DashX SDK that sent the events, such as @dashx/browser, by sessions. | |
| Geography | Countries, Cities | Where visitors are, by sessions. |
| Languages | The language and region set in the visitor's browser, such as en-IN, by sessions. | |
| Clicks | Top clicks | The elements visitors click most, with the number of clicks and visitors. |
A few things to know about how the numbers are counted:
- Session values. Each session is counted once per breakdown. Entry pages, Channels, Referrers and the UTM tabs use the session's first page view, and Exit pages its last. The other tabs use the session's first page view that matches your filters. A value that was not recorded is shown as (none).
- Average time on page comes from the time recorded when a visitor leaves a page.
- Referrers are other websites only. Moving between pages of your own website does not count as a referrer.
- Top clicks groups clicks by what the visitor saw: the element's text, or else its
aria-label, or else itsid(shown with a#), or else its selector. The same label on different kinds of elements is listed separately, and hovering over a row shows the link target for links. Form submits are not included. - Page views with no session, for example ones tracked from a server, count in Visitors, Page views and Top pages. They are not counted in Sessions or in the other breakdowns.
Channels
Each session gets one channel, from its first page view:
| Channel | When |
|---|---|
| Direct | No referrer and no campaign tags. |
| Organic Search, Organic Social, Organic Video, Organic Shopping | The visitor came from a search engine, social network, video site or shopping site, without paid campaign tags. |
| Paid Search, Paid Social, Paid Video, Paid Shopping | The same sources with a paid utm_medium (such as cpc, ppc or paid), or an ad click id in the landing page URL (such as gclid or msclkid). |
| Paid Unknown | A paid utm_medium from a source DashX doesn't recognize. |
| Cross Network | utm_campaign is cross-network. |
| Email, SMS, Push, Affiliate, Audio | The campaign tags say so, for example utm_medium=email. Visits from webmail such as Gmail count as Email. |
| Referral | Any other website, or utm_medium set to referral. |
| Unknown | Campaign tags that don't match any of the above. |
Path cleaning
Pages whose paths contain ids, such as /orders/1042 and /orders/1043, are usually the same page. Path cleaning rules group them, so Top pages shows /orders/:id once instead of one row per order.
- Open the rules with the settings button next to Clean paths in the filter bar, or from the Setup tab of the Analytics app under Apps in the Workspace dashboard. Rules belong to the Workspace, so every Environment uses the same rules and everyone sees the same grouping.
- Each rule replaces every match of its regex with its alias, and rules run in order. In an alias, use
\1to\9to keep a part of the match captured by the regex. - Regexes use RE2 syntax, so lookahead, lookbehind and backreferences are not available.
- Add suggested rules adds rules for UUIDs and for numeric path segments.
- The preview in the settings dialog shows how your top paths look with the rules you are editing. Try a path shows what any path you type becomes, in the dialog and on the Setup tab.
- Turn Clean paths off to see paths exactly as they were recorded. Turning it on or off removes any Path, Entry path and Exit path filters, because their values only match in one mode.
Rules apply when the page loads, so a change also regroups past data. A rule that can't be run is not saved. If a saved rule ever stops working, it is skipped, the page still loads, and a warning next to Clean paths points to it.
What is left out
Visits from bots and crawlers are left out of every number. DashX recognizes them from the browser's user agent.
Where the data comes from
The browser SDK sends the page, referrer, session and campaign with each event. When DashX receives an event, it adds:
- the browser, operating system and device type, from the user agent
- the country and city, from the IP address the event was sent from
- the channel, from the referrer, campaign tags and landing page URL
Channels are worked out when an event arrives, so events recorded before channels were introduced show the channel (none).
Learn more about what the SDK sends, and how to keep personal data out of it, in Autocapture.