Dashboard guide
A tour of the dashboard, with a plain definition for every number. If a figure ever surprises you, the answer is probably on this page.
The pages#
| Page | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Analytics | The overview: visitors, pageviews, buy clicks, sales and revenue over time, then where visitors and money come from. |
| Realtime | Who is on the site right now, and who is most likely to buy. |
| Visitors | Every visit, a weekly heatmap, and whether people come back. |
| Funnels | Where visitors drop off between steps, and the common paths through your site. |
| Goals | Your custom events, counted. |
| Mentions | Posts about your site on Hacker News, Reddit and Bluesky. |
| Settings | Sites, tracking snippet, revenue connections, sharing, plan, account, API keys. |
An Apps page appears only for sites imported from Umami that have an app website attached. The site switcher at the top of the sidebar picks one site or All sites, and the date menu and filter at the top of each page apply to everything on it. See filters, compare and notes.
The five headline numbers#
The tiles at the top of Analytics. Click one to chart it. Each shows the change against the period right before the one you picked, with the same length.
| Number | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Visitors | Distinct visitor ids in the range. One person who comes back on three days counts once, as long as the network, browser and month are the same. An id is a hash of IP address and User-Agent that changes every month (see privacy), so people on one office network with the same browser can share an id, and someone who switches from Wi-Fi to mobile data counts twice. Under it: the share of visits that left after one page. |
| Pageviews | Every page load, plus every route change in a single-page app. Under it: pageviews per visit and the average visit duration. |
| Buy clicks | Events named exactly buy, and what share of visitors fired one. See event names. |
| Sales | Paid orders from your connected provider in the range, refunds excluded. Under it: sales as a share of visitors. |
| Revenue | The net-of-tax total of those orders, and the average per order. |
Visit, bounce and duration#
- Visit (session): one visitor's run of activity. A new visit starts after 30 minutes without any event from the same visitor.
- Bounce: a visit with exactly one pageview. Custom events do not make a visit “not a bounce”. The tile shows it as “left after one page”, as a share of visits.
- Duration: the time between a visit's first and last event, averaged over visits. A visit with one event has no measurable duration and counts as zero, so single-page visits pull the average down.
The chart#
Hourly for Today, daily up to 120 days, monthly beyond that (so Last 12 months is monthly). The right edge is today, drawn as an incomplete period. Turn on Compare with the period before to overlay the previous period; it is available for visitors, pageviews, sales and revenue. The change shown on each tile compares the same elapsed time: Today at 3 pm is set against yesterday until 3 pm, not against all of yesterday. Add note pins a short label to a day (see notes).
Insights#
Up to four plain-English sentences written from the numbers on screen: the visitor change against the period before, the top source and its share of visitors, the source with the most attributed revenue, the busiest day, and the most visited page after the home page. They are computed in your browser from the same data as the charts, with no guesswork or model behind them.
Sources, pages, locations, devices#
Four panels, each with tabs. Click a row to filter the whole page by it. Visitor counts in these lists are distinct visitors per value.
| Panel | Tabs | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Sources | Channels, Referrers, Campaigns, Revenue | Where each visit began. Channel is a bucket (below). Referrer is the host of the referring page. Campaign reads the utm_source or ?ref= on the landing URL. Revenue is money by first-visit source. |
| Pages | Top pages, Entry, Exit, Revenue | Top pages is distinct visitors who viewed a path. Entry counts visits that started on a path, Exit visits that ended there. Revenue is money by the visitor's landing page. |
| Locations | Countries, Regions, Cities, Revenue | From the visitor's request, taken at the first hit of the visit. Revenue by country uses the buyer's first visit, falling back to the payment's billing country. |
| Devices | Browsers, OS, Devices, Revenue | Parsed from the User-Agent. In-app browsers (Instagram, TikTok, X and similar) show as an in-app browser. Devices are desktop, mobile or tablet. |
Channels#
Pulse assigns each visit one channel from its first referrer and its utm_medium and utm_source:
| Channel | When |
|---|---|
| Direct | No referrer and no UTM source. |
| Organic search | The referrer is a search engine (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, Ecosia, Brave, Kagi and others). |
| Organic social | The referrer is a social network or community site (X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Reddit, Hacker News, Telegram, Bluesky and others), or the medium is social. |
| Paid search / Paid social | The medium is cpc, ppc, paid, cpm, display, retargeting or ads; social sources become paid social. |
A webmail referrer, or the medium or source is email or newsletter. | |
| Video | YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Twitch and similar. |
| AI assistants | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and similar, by referrer or source. |
| Referral | Any other website that linked to you. |
Recent sales#
The last eight orders in the range: product, country, source and amount. Free orders show “Free”. Orders without a traced visit show no source.
Where the data comes from#
- Pulse-tracked sites: everything comes from your own script and the
/api/collectendpoint. Numbers refresh about every minute. - Imported Umami sites: traffic is read live from Umami with your own API key; revenue comes from the providers you connect to Pulse. See import from Umami.
- Time zone: day boundaries follow the site's time zone (Settings, Sites, Edit).
- Location: country comes from your host's or Cloudflare's request headers. City and region need Cloudflare's Add visitor location headers managed transform (see self-hosting).
- Dark mode: the dashboard has System, Light and Dark appearances (Settings, Account). The marketing site and these docs are always light.
Common issues#
- Visitors here and in another tool do not match
- Tools define a “visitor” differently (cookies, fingerprints, sessions). Pulse counts distinct hashed visitor ids, and drops known bots, so it is usually lower than tools that count crawlers.
- Pageviews are higher than visits times pages I expect
- Single-page apps count each route change. Reloading counts again.
- “Direct” is huge
- Links from apps and email clients often carry no referrer. Tag your own links with
?utm_source=or?ref=so they show up under their own name. - lemonsqueezy.com is missing from Referrers
- Pulse hides visits that come back from the checkout domain, since a buyer returning from checkout is not a source.
- City is empty
- Your host did not send a city. On Cloudflare, turn on Add visitor location headers under Rules, Managed Transforms.