What the numbers count
Visitors, visits, views, bounce rate and duration, defined exactly, plus why they differ from other analytics.
All pages
Every metric in sonex is derived from one raw thing: an event with a timestamp. Everything else is arithmetic on top. This page is that arithmetic, in plain terms.
Visitors
A visitor is one recognised browser, counted once inside the range you are looking at.
Recognition works without cookies. For each event, sonex takes the website, the request’s network address and browser signature, and a salt, then runs them through a one-way hash. Matching inputs produce the same session id; the raw inputs are not stored and cannot be recovered from the id.
The salt rotates daily on the hosted service. When it rotates, every signature changes, so nobody is trackable across days by design.
Visits
A visit (also called a session) is one browsing sitting. It starts at the first event and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. Come back after lunch and you are the same visitor on a new visit.
One visitor can have many visits. Visits is usually the number you want when asking “how often do people come back”, and visitors when asking “how many people are there”.
Views
A view is one pageview event. Ten refreshes are ten views, one visit, one visitor.
Bounce rate
A bounce is a visit with exactly one event. Bounce rate is bounces divided by visits.
So a visitor who lands, reads your entire article for six minutes, and leaves without clicking anything is a bounce. That is not a flaw in the definition; it means bounce rate measures interaction, not satisfaction. On a single-page site, a high bounce rate is normal and mostly meaningless.
If bounces are drowning your other numbers, the Exclude bounces toggle removes single-event visits from what you are looking at. See Dates and filters.
Visit duration
Duration is measured from the first event of a visit to the last, then averaged across visits.
Fire a custom event on a real interaction (see Custom events) and those visits start carrying real duration.
Why these differ from Google Analytics
They will not match, and neither number is lying:
- No cookies. GA follows a browser across months with a stored id. sonex recognises a browser inside a rotating salt window. Returning-visitor counts diverge most.
- Bots. sonex drops known bots by user agent, so obvious crawler traffic is not in your numbers.
- Blockers. Both are blocked by privacy extensions, at different rates.
- Different definitions. “Session”, “engagement” and “bounce” mean different things in each product.
Use one tool to answer a question and stick with it. Comparing absolute values across tools is a way to waste an afternoon.
Next: Dates and filters, which is how you turn these totals into an answer.