How to Read Your Analytics Dashboard (Plain Guide)

You installed analytics. Now you are staring at a dashboard full of numbers and wondering what any of it means. This guide explains every number in plain language.

Visitors vs pageviews

These two numbers are often confused.

Visitors — how many people came to your site in the selected period. If the same person visits three times in a week, that might count as one visitor (in cookie-based tools) or up to three (in cookieless tools, depending on the methodology).

Pageviews — how many page loads occurred. If one person visits your homepage, then your blog, then your about page, that is one visitor and three pageviews.

A healthy site typically has more pageviews than visitors. If pageviews equal visitors, most people are only viewing one page — which may be fine for a blog (people read the article and leave) or concerning for a product (nobody is exploring).

Bounce rate

The percentage of sessions where the visitor viewed only one page before leaving.

A 70% bounce rate means 70% of sessions ended after one page. Context matters:

High bounce rate on a blog — usually fine. People came, read, left.
High bounce rate on a product landing page — may indicate a mismatch between what visitors expected and what they found.
High bounce rate on a pricing page — worth investigating. Are people leaving because they found what they needed, or because the pricing was too high?

Do not optimise bounce rate in isolation. Ask what behaviour you actually want on each page.

Top pages

The list of pages sorted by pageview count. This answers: what are people actually reading on my site?

Look at this weekly. Surprises are common. The post you thought would perform well often sits behind the post you wrote quickly and expected little from.

Referrers

Where visitors came from. The referring site or source that sent them to you.

Common entries:

A specific website (e.g. news.ycombinator.com) — someone linked to you
twitter.com or t.co — social media traffic
google.com — search traffic (though GA shows more detail on search queries)
Direct / none — typed URL, bookmark, email link, or any link where the browser did not send a referrer header

Date ranges

The date range picker controls which time window your entire dashboard shows. Changing it updates all numbers, charts, and tables simultaneously.

Useful ranges:

Last 7 days — your baseline for weekly performance
Last 30 days — better for spotting trends and smoothing out spikes
Custom range — compare a campaign period, a launch window, or a specific month

Compare two periods by checking the numbers for each range separately. Many dashboards do not have built-in period comparison — looking at the trend line tells the same story.

"Real-time" indicator

The number of visitors currently active on your site (usually in the last few minutes). Useful when you are watching a live launch or have just posted something.

Real-time is a live count. It does not affect your historical metrics.

FAQ

Why don't my visitor numbers match Google Analytics? Different tools use different visitor-counting methods. Antlytics is cookieless, so it counts visitors who would have declined GA's consent request. This often means Antlytics shows more visitors than GA.

What's a good bounce rate? There is no universally good bounce rate. It depends on the page type and what you want visitors to do. Treat it as a signal to investigate, not a target to hit.

Why does my direct traffic seem so high? Direct traffic includes bookmarks, email links without UTMs, mobile apps, and links where the browser strips the referrer. It is often higher than people expect.

What does "pageviews" include? Every page load recorded by the tracking script. This includes your own visits during development unless you exclude them.