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. 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 of 6 hours, so if someone does not return to your website for over 6 hours then they are counted as a new visitor again

Determining returning visitors without a cookie

If you disabled the use of a cookie in the plugin settings then Koko Analytics will attempt to detect a returning visitor based off the referrer string. This method is less reliable than using a cookie, as it will always count someone coming from an external website or typing the address in their browser’s address bar as a new visitor.

If this person were to click around on your website it would still only count as a single visitor though, because our plugin notices that the visit came from a link on your website.

The cookie only stores a list of visited pages and is therefore not intruding on your visitor’s privacy in any way. We recommend using a cookie whenever possible.