Last updated 9 September 2026.These are the rules behind the numbers in Pulse. They are written so you can explain a report to a colleague or a client. They match the product as it runs today.
Visitor
A visitor in a date range is a unique daily counting identifier, not a person and not a cookie. Pulse builds that identifier from the site, the UTC calendar day, a truncated IP address and a coarse browser description, then hashes it with a secret that changes every UTC day. The same person on two different UTC days counts as two visitors. The identifier cannot be turned back into an IP address.
Pageview
Each recorded page load or in-app navigation that the tracker sends is one pageview. Query strings are not stored. Imported CSV history can add pageviews. Imports do not add unique visitors for the whole site.
Visit
A visit is a burst of activity for the same daily visitor identifier. If more than 30 minutes pass without activity, the next page or event starts a new visit. A new UTC day also starts a new identifier, so visits do not continue overnight in UTC. Pulse does not use a session cookie.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of visits that recorded exactly one pageview. A visit with two pageviews is never a bounce, even if it was short.
Visit duration
When the tracker sends engagement time, Pulse sums the time the page was visible. If no engagement was sent, duration is the time between the first and last activity in that visit. The overview shows the average across visits that had a pageview.
Live
Realtime uses a short window: a visitor is treated as present if a heartbeat or pageview arrived in the last 45 seconds, and recent activity lists use about two minutes.
Funnels
A funnel is an ordered list of pages or events. A visitor is counted on a step only if they already completed the earlier steps in the same visit, in that order. Counts are unique daily visitors who reached the step, not the number of visits.
Revenue
Payments are stored separately from pageviews. Pulse never adds different currencies together. Net is the amount minus processor fees and refunds. A payment is attributed when Pulse can match it to a visit hash and a landing page.Last-touch looks back 48 hours for the latest pageview on that visit hash, skipping thank-you paths you exclude. If there is no match, the payment still appears, without a guessed source or page.
Quota
The monthly quota counts pageviews, custom events and conversions in UTC calendar months. Detected bots do not count. Heartbeats, engagement, heatmap clicks and Web Vitals do not count. When the quota is reached, new billable events are rejected until the next month or a higher plan.
Web Vitals
With the full tracker, Pulse reports LCP, INP, CLS, FCP and TTFB at the 75th percentile, with sample counts and good / needs-improvement / poor ratings from the browser.
Short links
Redirect clicks are a lifetime counter on the link. They are not billed. Visitors, conversions and revenue on a link need the Pulse tracker on the destination page. The two numbers will not always match.
What we do not claim
Pulse does not report a single person across days, does not use an analytics cookie, does not mix currencies into one total, and does not treat imported CSV uniques as Pulse uniques. Ad blockers, privacy signals, quota limits and a paused subscription all mean some visits are never recorded.