Visitors versus pageviews

In Koko Analytics, a visitor represents a person viewing your website. This person can only ever increment the visitor count for your site or a specific page by 1, but can increment the pageviews count by more than 1 by viewing multiple pages on your website or loading a page more than once.

Given a person named John visiting your homepage, this would count as 1 visitor and 1 pageview.

If John would then follow a link to your contact page and then go back to your homepage again, Koko Analytics would have counted 1 visitor and 3 pageviews in total for your entire site.

For your homepage, it would have counted 1 visitor and 2 pageviews.

For your contact page, it would have counted 1 visitor and 1 pageview.

A note on cookies to determine returning visitors

By default, Koko Analytics uses a cookie to detect returning visitors, although you can also configure the plugin to use no cookies.

When using cookie-based tracking, a single person viewing your website using two different devices or browsers would count as 2 visitors because the cookie in one browser is different to the cookie of the other browser. There is no way around this without intruding on the privacy of your visitor.

The cookie has a lifetime until midnight in your site’s local timezone. This effectively means that if someone visits your site twice in the same day, they will be counted as a single visitor.

Determining returning visitors without a cookie

By choosing the Cookieless tracking method, you can disable the use of cookies entirely and use a technique called fingerprinting instead.

You can read more about how this technique accurately detects returning visitors here: cookie vs. cookieless tracking.