Measuring Visits

You want to know which pages help, where visitors come from, and whether the ones a campaign brings stay to read. A Uniweb site reports what its visitors do from the site itself: there is no tag to install, nothing is stored on a visitor's device, and it works the same on any foundation.

Audience: whoever reads a site's numbers, and the developer who sets the site up.

Turning it on

Reports need somewhere to go, so nothing is sent until the site names a destination.

On Uniweb Cloud (uniweb publish, or publishing from the Uniweb app), ask your host to collect for you:

# site.yml
services:
  tracking: true

On any other host, name a collector of your own. It receives the reports as JSON, in batches, in the format the reference describes:

services:
  tracking: https://collector.example.com/events

A page shown in the app's editing preview reports nothing, so composing a site doesn't count as traffic. Neither does uniweb dev, which has no host, unless you name a collector.

What a page reports

The runtime sends these by itself:

report	when	what it carries
`page_view`	each page a visitor opens, including the first	the page, the site that linked to yours, and the campaign tags the visitor arrived with
`time_on_page`	when the visitor leaves the page	how long it was in front of them, `durationMs`
`outbound_click`	a visitor follows a link to another site	that site's host name, and nothing else of the address
`section_view`	a section is at least half on screen, once per page view	the section
`section_click`	a click inside a section	the section
`conversion`, `engagement`	an act the site counts	the act's name: Conversions and Engagements

Components can report more. Kit's <Media> reports how far a video was watched, and useReadingDepth() how far down a long section a reader got.

Which of these are sent is the site's choice. With a collector of your own, the default is page_view, outbound_click and section_view; emit: all adds the rest, including any a later release adds. Where your host collects, the default is what your host says it collects. Either way, emit in site.yml decides: Choosing what is sent.

Where visitors come from

page_view carries the page that linked the visitor to your site (referrer), and three campaign tags from the address they arrived at: utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. Any link you control can say where it was: an ad, a newsletter, a post.

https://example.com/pricing?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring

Both are read once, when the visitor arrives, and every later page view of that visit carries them, since the address loses its tags as soon as the visitor moves on. So a count of page views by utm_source counts the views of visitors who arrived from that source.

Tag your links in one scheme and keep to it, since a report can only split what the tags tell apart. Give a paid post utm_medium=paid_social and a free one social, for instance, or the visitors an ad bought are counted with those a post brought for free.

A conversion can carry more of that first address, such as utm_content for the ad or an ad platform's click ID: Carrying the campaign.

How long they stay

time_on_page is reported once for each page a visitor opens, at the first moment they leave it: by opening another page, switching to another tab or app, or closing it. A phone can discard a page in the background without warning, so the switch is the last moment a report is sure to leave.

So it measures the time until the visitor first looked away. A reader who switches apps to paste a command and comes back is counted up to the switch. A page left open on a screen nobody is reading counts the whole time, and a few of those pull an average far up, so a median says more about how long people read.

What it doesn't count

Nothing is stored on the visitor's device: no cookie, and no local storage. Each report carries a visit value that lives in the page's memory and identifies one page load, so your collector can put a visit's reports in order. It can't be linked to another tab, another day or another site.

Unique visitors, sessions, returning visitors and bounce rates all need an identifier kept on the device, and this has none. It counts page views and acts, and stops there. That is a trade, and it is worth knowing before you compare these numbers with another tool's.

If the laws where you operate call for consent, consent: required holds every report until the visitor answers, and a component in your foundation asks the question: Consent.