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Visitor tracking

Follow what visitors do across a visit

Counting visits tells you how many people came. Visitor tracking tells you what they did once they arrived, which is the part that changes what you build next.

Start freeRead the guides

What counting alone leaves out

  • Pages in the visit you can seeThe first one
  • Where people leaveUnknown
  • Whether a campaign sent the right peopleUnknown
  • Screens needed to find outSeveral, elsewhere

This is for you if

  • You know how many people arrive and have no idea what they do next.
  • You want to find the page people leave from, not just the page they land on.
  • You want to compare two groups — one campaign against another, mobile against desktop — without exporting anything.
  • You want to mark a few actions that matter as events and see them counted beside the pages.
  • You are comfortable with behaviour described in aggregate rather than replayed.

And not for you if

  • You want session replay: a video of the visit, with scrolling and clicks. This records what was visited, never how a pointer moved.

  • You want heatmaps of where people clicked on a page.

  • You want to open one named person's history and read it. The counting key rotates daily, so there is no visitor to open.

    See /privacy-friendly-analytics

  • You need to join this behaviour to a customer record in your own database.

    See /saas-analytics

The first two are what most people mean by tracking, and this is not that. What it does instead is aggregate, which is also why it needs no consent banner.

What maps to what

Behaviour here is a sequence of pageviews and events, read in aggregate. Each question below is answered on a screen rather than assembled from raw rows.

What you want to knowVisitWatchWhat actually differs
Which page did they land on?Traffic → PagesRanked by visitors, with the previous period beside each row.
Where did they leave?FunnelsDefine the sequence you expected; the step with the steepest drop is where they stopped.
How long did they stay?Average timeA column on the pages table, alongside visitors rather than instead of them.
Did they bounce?Bounce rateOn the headline strip. High bounce with a long visit usually means the page answered the question.
Which campaign brought them?Traffic → SourcesReferrer and UTM campaign, resolved to a name rather than a raw host.
What device were they on?Funnels → breakdownDevice, browser and country, scoped to the funnel step you selected.
Did they do the thing?EventsCustom events counted over the range. Any one of them can be the site's goal.
Replay the visit—Not recorded, and not something a plan unlocks.

One row has no equivalent, and it is the one people most often assume is included.

The reports, in the order you would actually open them

Not the full product tour. This is the sequence somebody in this situation works through, and what each step is for.

1

Which pages are people actually reading?

Traffic → Pages

Start here rather than on the total. Average time sits beside visitors, so a page with few visitors and long visits is visible rather than buried.

2

Where does the visit stop?

Funnels

Write the sequence you expected somebody to follow. The report runs it against your own traffic and marks the single steepest drop.

3

Is it everybody, or one kind of visitor?

Funnels → breakdown

Scope the breakdown to the leaking step and read it by device, browser or country. This is the difference between a copy problem and a broken button on one browser.

4

Does that group behave differently everywhere else?

Segments

Save the group as a segment and every figure is measured against the same window as the site total, so the share is comparable rather than approximate.

What to look at first

Behaviour reports are more useful with a few days of data behind them. This is the order that gets you somewhere on day one anyway.

1

Add the script

One line, and pageviews start arriving. Realtime is how you confirm it is firing on every route rather than only the home page.

A minute

2

Mark two or three actions

Custom events for the things that matter — a signup, a download, a demo request. They are counted on the Events screen from then on.

Under an hour

3

Write the funnel you assume happens

Then look at where it is wrong. That gap is usually the most useful thing on the site in the first week.

Ten minutes

Questions people in this situation ask

These are on the guides index too, alongside every other question the site answers.

Is this the same as session recording?

No. Nothing is replayed. VisitWatch records which pages were visited, in what order, with the source, device and country of the request — behaviour in aggregate rather than a reconstruction of one visit.

Can I see individual visitors?

No. The key used to count a visitor rotates daily, so there is no persistent visitor to open. Behaviour is read through funnels, segments and cohorts instead.

Does it work on single page applications?

Yes. Route changes are counted as pageviews, which is what makes the pages table and the funnel steps line up with what somebody actually saw.

Other solutions

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See what visitors do

Install the script and the behaviour reports start filling immediately. No configuration step first.

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