Visitors Reports

Understand who is visiting your website.

Overview

The Visitors section provides detailed information about the people visiting your website — when they visit, how often they return, where they’re located, and what technology they use.

Navigate to Visitors in the reporting menu. Its reports include Overview, Visits Log, Real-time (plus a Real-time Map), Locations, Devices, Software, Times, User IDs, and Cohorts.

Key Metrics

Before diving into reports, understand these core visitor metrics:

Visits Overview

Location: Visitors → Overview

The main visitors report showing traffic trends over time. Use this to:

• Track overall traffic growth or decline
• Spot unusual spikes or drops
• Compare periods to identify trends (use the compare option in the date picker to overlay a second period or segment on the graph)

Key Questions This Answers

• Is traffic growing or shrinking?
• What day had the most visitors?
• How does this month compare to last month?

Real-Time

Location: Visitors → Real-time

See who’s on your website right now:

• Live visitor counts — Visits and pageviews over the last 30 minutes and 24 hours
• Latest visits — Location, referrer, device, and actions for each active visitor
• Real-time Map — A live world map of visits as they happen (its own entry in the Visitors menu)

Use Cases

• Monitor traffic during a campaign launch
• See immediate impact of social media posts
• Verify tracking is working after installation

Locations

Location: Visitors → Locations

• Visitor Map — A geographic visualization; darker colors mean more visitors, and clicking a country drills into regions and cities
• Country / Region / City — Tabular breakdowns of the same data

About Location Accuracy

Locations come from a geolocation database keyed on the visitor’s IP address. Country-level data is quite reliable; region and especially city-level data is approximate. Visitors on VPNs, corporate proxies, or some mobile carriers are located where their network is registered — not where they sit. Treat city data as directional, not exact.

Devices

Location: Visitors → Devices

Understand what hardware your visitors use:

• Device type — Desktop, smartphone, tablet, and more. Critical for prioritizing optimization.
• Device brand & model — Specific devices (iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, etc.)
• Screen resolutions — Informs responsive design decisions

Software

Location: Visitors → Software

The software side of your audience’s technology:

• Browsers — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, etc. (with version drill-down). Helps prioritize browser testing.
• Operating systems — Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and versions
• Browser plugins and configurations — Combined OS/browser/resolution profiles

Times

Location: Visitors → Times

When your visitors come to your website:

• Visits per local time — Traffic by the visitor’s clock. Best for timing email sends, social posts, and staffing live chat.
• Visits per server time — Traffic by your instance’s clock. Useful for correlating with server-side events; this is why the two graphs differ for a geographically spread audience.
• Visits by day of week — Which days get the most traffic — useful for timing content publication and maintenance windows.

Visits Log

Location: Visitors → Visits Log

A detailed, chronological log of individual visits. Each entry shows the visit’s duration and action count, plus:

• Actions — Pageviews, events, site searches, downloads, and outlinks, in order
• Conversions — Goals completed and ecommerce orders or abandoned carts
• Location — Country, region, city
• Device — Browser, OS, screen size
• Referrer — How they found your site

Visitor Profile

Hover over a visit and open the Visitor Profile to see that visitor’s full history: total visits and pageviews, time on site, conversions per goal, revenue, devices, locations, and internal searches — with their most recent visits listed in detail.

Privacy Note

The Visits Log and Visitor Profile show individual-level behavioral data — and, to logged-in users, technical identifiers like the visitor’s (anonymized) IP and visitor ID. Grant report access accordingly, and remember that segments make it easy to isolate small groups of visits. If your compliance posture requires it, these visit-level views can be disabled globally or per site — contact support.

User IDs

Location: Visitors → User IDs

When your site identifies signed-in users to Ghost Metrics (_paq.push(['setUserId', userId]); before trackPageView), this report shows visits, actions, and conversions per user — connecting the same person’s sessions across devices and browsers.

Analyzing Returning Visitors

There’s no separate “Engagement” page — returning-visitor analysis is done with segments and widgets:

• Apply the built-in Returning visitors segment to any report
• Add the visits by visit number and days since last visit widgets to a dashboard
• Use Cohorts for retention over time

Segmenting Visitor Data

You can apply segments to any visitor report to analyze subsets of your audience:

• Mobile visitors only
• Visitors from a specific campaign
• Visitors who completed a goal
• New visitors vs returning visitors

Segments help you understand how different audiences behave differently.

Exporting Visitor Data

All visitor reports can be exported:

1. Navigate to the report you want to export
2. Click the export icon
3. Choose format: CSV, TSV (Excel), XML, JSON, or HTML
4. Download the file

For recurring exports, set up scheduled email reports under Administration → Personal → Email Reports.

Next Steps

• Behavior reports — See what visitors do on your site
• Acquisition reports — Understand where visitors come from
• Goals — Track visitor conversions