Reading the dashboard
What every number on the Overview means, how the date range and comparison work, and how to read the flags on the traffic chart.
Every site opens on its Overview: a row of headline numbers, the traffic chart under them, and a grid of breakdown cards below that. The sections down the left rail are the same dashboard narrowed to one question. This page explains what each number means and how the controls above the chart change it.
The five headline numbers
| Metric | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Visitors | Distinct people in the window. Counting is cookieless, so a visitor is identified by a hash that rotates every day: someone who returns on three days counts once on each of them. |
| Visits | Sessions. A visit ends after 30 minutes without activity, so one person can make several visits in a day. |
| Pageviews | Page loads, including navigations inside a single-page app. |
| Bounce rate | The share of visits that saw one page and went no further. |
| Visit duration | Average time from a visit's first hit to its last. Time only accrues while the tab is actually on screen, so a page left open in a background tab does not inflate it. |
Views per visit and the custom-event count sit alongside them. Clicking a metric switches the chart to that series, so the line under the number always belongs to the number you last pressed.
Choosing a window
The range selector sits above the chart and moves the whole dashboard, every card included. It offers Realtime, Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, This week, This month, Last 30 days, Last 90 days, This year, Year to date, Last year, Last 12 months, All time and a Custom date pair. Relative ranges resolve in the site's reporting timezone, not your browser's.
- The arrows beside the selector step one window back or forward, so Last 7 days becomes the seven days before it. The left and right arrow keys do the same.
- Each range has a keyboard shortcut shown in the menu: press
dfor today,tfor last 30 days,rfor realtime, and so on. - Realtime is two windows at once. The headline count is the last 5 minutes, the people on the site right now; the chart draws the last 30 minutes minute by minute so that number has a shape behind it. The view refreshes itself while it is open.
- The window you pick is remembered per browser, so the dashboard reopens where you left it.
Compare adds a second, dimmer line for the period before this one (or a custom period you name), and every headline number gains a percentage change against it. Grain sets the bucket size: minute, hour, day, week or month, offered only at the sizes that make sense for the window you are on.
Flags on the chart
The chart is the product's point: traffic and the things that could explain it on one axis. Numbered flags sit along the bottom, and clicking one opens the record behind it. Each group has its own toggle, so you can hide the ones you are not looking for.
| Flag group | What it marks |
|---|---|
| Page/site change | Edits Numative detected on the site: titles, meta descriptions, content, redirects, indexability, platform changes. |
| Backlinks | A day on which links to your site were gained or lost, with the day's actual links behind the flag. |
| Web vitals | A Core Web Vital changing grade, in either direction. |
| Annotation | Something you marked yourself: a deploy, a campaign, an email send. See Annotations. |
| Referral spike | A referring site sending far more traffic than usual, with the page that sent it where Numative could find it. |
| Social mention | A post, thread or video mentioning or linking to your site, rendered in place so you can read it without leaving. |
| Google update | A confirmed Google ranking update, so a shift that lines up with one is not misread as your own doing. |
Two more things are drawn on the chart rather than flagged. A shaded band marks imported history, so reconstructed days are visibly not collected ones. And when a site tracks bots, non-human traffic gets its own lines, never mixed into the visitor counts.
The breakdown cards
Under the chart, each card answers one question and carries tabs for the different ways of asking it.
| Card | Tabs |
|---|---|
| Sources | Sources, Channels, Referrers, and a Campaigns menu covering all five UTM parameters. |
| Pages | Top pages, Entry pages, Exit pages. The line underneath names the biggest mover in the window and links to its diagnosis. |
| Locations | A map plus Country, Region and City. The map switches between a flat projection and a globe. |
| Devices | Browser and version, OS and version, device type, and screen size. |
| Interactions | Your custom events beside the things captured automatically: form submissions, links, outbound links, affiliate links, buttons and dead clicks. |
| Goals | Each goal by converting visitors. Only on sites that have goals. |
| Traffic by type | Human traffic beside each crawler, split by what the crawler came for. Only when bot traffic is switched on. |
Clicking any row filters the whole dashboard to it. Pick a country and the chart, the pages, the sources and the goals all narrow to that country. Filters stack, they show as chips above the chart, and they live in the URL, so a filtered view can be bookmarked or sent to a teammate. See Filters & segments.
The Speed card closes the page with your Core Web Vitals, and the toolbar menu beside the range selector holds saved segments, the humans/bots view and the CSV export of everything currently on screen.
Where to go next
- Traffic moved and you want to know why: Anomalies, then the page's own detail view.
- You want to know what people do rather than how many: Flow for the routes through the site, Journeys for one visitor at a time.
- You want to be told rather than to look: Alerts & email reports.