Documentation
The Visitors screen focuses on visitors rather than page views — how many
distinct visitors you had, how many were new vs. returning, and a browsable list
of them one by one. Each "visitor" here is a pseudonymous signature — a
rotating, salted hash, never a name or an identifiable person — so a "profile"
is simply everything that one signature did, not a dossier on a real individual
(see Understanding your metrics).
Open it from Audience → Visitors. Like the Overview and Reports, the whole
page is arrangeable with ⚙ Customize Layout.
Headline cards
- Unique Visitors — distinct people in the selected range.
- New Visitors — first-time visitors (with their share of the total).
- Returning Visitors — people who had visited before.
A high returning share (52% in the example below) means people keep coming back;
a high new share means you're reaching fresh audiences. Both can be healthy
depending on your goals.
Views & Unique Visitors Over Time
The same day-by-day chart as on Reports, with an optional
previous-period overlay (tick Show Prev. period) — here framed around
visitors. For a single-day range (Today, or any one custom date) it switches
to hour-by-hour with yesterday overlaid — not a fault, just a finer scale.
The visitors table
Below the chart is a paginated, sortable list of individual visitors. Each row
shows:
- Visitor — a coloured ID chip (e.g.
a1b2c3d4). This is a privacy-
preserving signature, not a name. The same chip identifies the same visitor
everywhere in the plugin, and clicking it opens that visitor's full profile
(their sessions, journey and timeline). The timeline is where a total becomes a story: beside each page you can see what they actually did there — 👆 the buttons they clicked, 🎵 media they played, ⬇️ files they downloaded, 🔗 links out, and 📜 how far down they scrolled. - Last Active / First Visit — with a 🆕 New or 🔄 Returning badge.
- Pages (this period) and Sessions (this period) — how many pages they
viewed and how many separate visits they made, so you can see depth at a glance. - ⏱ Time (this period) — total engaged time.
- Device and Location.
Every column header is sortable. A 🆕 / 🔄 / 🍪 / 🔒 legend under the table
explains the badges:
- 🍪 Cookie visitors gave analytics consent and are tracked by a persistent
ID for accurate cross-month returning detection. - 🔒 Hash visitors are identified by a privacy hash derived from their request,
which rotates monthly. - 🤖 Suspected bot marks visitors flagged by the daily behaviour scan. The
signature is always the same three tells — a single page, zero interaction
events (no scrolls, clicks, downloads or plays) and no real input-device
signal (mouse move, key press, scroll wheel or touch) — in one of two shapes:
spread thin as repeat single-page sessions (coming back day after day to the
same page), or concentrated as a single-sitting burst (loading the same page
many times in one session, then leaving). Hover the badge to see which rule
fired. A visitor who ever moves the mouse, types or taps is treated as a person
and is never flagged. The flag is informational only (nothing is excluded from
your statistics) and clears automatically if the visitor starts interacting.
Dealing with a flagged visitor
Open a flagged visitor's profile and the verdict is yours — two buttons appear
under the visitor's details (admins only):
- ✅ Not a bot — removes the badge and remembers your decision: the daily
scan will never flag this visitor again. Use it when you know the "bot" is
real — a kiosk screen, your own monitoring, or a page too short to scroll. - 🗑 Delete this visitor's data — erases everything they did (visits,
sessions, engaged time, events) and recalculates the affected daily totals
and monthly visitor counts, so your historical numbers read as if the bot
had never visited. A tick box (on by default) also stops tracking the
identity from now on — future hits are ignored and logged in the
filtered-traffic panel. A bot that sheds its identity (clears cookies) gets
caught again by the next scans as the pattern re-accumulates.
Deletion recalculates from raw visit data, which is kept for your retention
period (365 days by default) — so any bot you deal with within a year of its
visits cleans up completely.
Filtering
- Use the All / New / Returning filter to narrow the list — the split bar
shows the new/returning balance at a glance, and each figure is a clickable
filter. - Arriving from another report (e.g. a referrer) may pre-filter the list to that
source; a banner shows the active filter with a ✕ Clear filter link.
Next: Sessions →