Reading your dashboard

One screen, six panels, zero mystery. This tour explains every number on the BobRay dashboard and, just as importantly, how each one is calculated without cookies.

• Key takeaways
• Visitors are day-scoped anonymous estimates, deliberately conservative across days.
• Avg. time is a median of engaged, tab-visible seconds, overnight tabs can't distort it.
• Click any row (page, source, country) to filter the whole dashboard to it.

The headline row

• Visitors: unique visits within the selected range, estimated from anonymous, rotating day-scoped identifiers, never from cookies or fingerprints.
• Pageviews: every page load or SPA route change.
• Avg. time: median engaged time per visit; we use the median so one open tab overnight cannot distort it.
• Bounce rate: share of visits that viewed a single page and triggered no events.

Top pages and entry pages

Top pages ranks by pageviews within the range. Entry pages shows where visits began, your real front doors, which often differ from what you link in the nav. Click any row to filter the whole dashboard to that page.

Sources

Sources group referrers into Search, Direct, Social, Email, and Referral. “Direct” means the browser sent no referrer, typed URLs, bookmarks, most native apps, and some strict-privacy browsers. A rising Direct share is normal and healthy; see Why referrers go missing for the mechanics.

Devices and countries

Device class and browser come from the user-agent string, aggregated immediately. Country comes from a coarse IP lookup performed in memory before the IP is discarded; we never store city-level or precise location.

Comparing ranges

Every panel supports comparison: pick a range, then Compare → Previous period or a custom window. Deltas are shown inline, green for up, amber for down, so a weekly review takes minutes, not a spreadsheet.

Common pitfalls

The mistakes we see most often on this topic, so you can skip them entirely.

• Comparing our daily uniques to cookie-based weekly uniques, different definitions, see the metric table below.
• Reading a big 'Direct' slice as typed traffic; most of it is apps and privacy browsers stripping referrers.
• Judging bounce rate on pages that are supposed to answer in one view, docs and contact pages bounce by design.

Quick reference