Your first site
What you see on the dashboard, and what each number means.
After installation, open your site's dashboard. The whole picture fits on one page.
The header
- Site switcher — jump between sites you own or belong to.
- Date range — realtime (last 30 minutes), today, yesterday, last 7 days, last 30 days, this month, or last month.
A "day" follows the site's timezone, which you set once in the site's settings, not the viewer's timezone.
The five headline numbers
| Number | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Unique visitors | Distinct daily visitor hashes in the range. |
| Pageviews | Total pages loaded. |
| Views per visit | Pageviews divided by sessions. |
| Bounce rate | Share of sessions with exactly one pageview. |
| Visit duration | Average time between the first and last pageview of a session, excluding bounces. |
A session ends after 30 minutes without a pageview. See How visitors are counted for the exact rules.
The chart
Visitors and pageviews over the selected range. Hover a point to see the exact values. The chart respects the site's timezone.
Breakdowns
Each panel has tabs:
- Pages — top, entry, and exit pages.
- Sources — channels, sources, campaigns, and mediums. Known search engines and social networks are grouped by name.
- Locations — countries, regions, and cities, plus a world map. Derived from the request's edge location, never from a stored IP.
- Devices & OS — device, browser, operating system, and screen-size bucket, parsed from the user agent at ingestion and then discarded.
Click any row to filter the whole dashboard by it. Filters stack, and the filter bar shows what is applied.
Realtime
Pick Realtime (30m) in the date range. You get visitors active in the last 5 minutes, a per-minute chart for the last 30 minutes, and the top pages, sources, and countries. It refreshes every 10 seconds.
Use it as your smoke test right after installing.
What is not here
Sift does not track custom events, goals, or funnels. There is no user-level timeline, because there are no user identities to build one from.
If you need a number that is not on this page, it is either not collected, or it belongs to a different tool.