How we count.

Where each rule applies

How it works

People and visits

• A person is a distinct visitor id.
• A visit starts on first activity, after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at 24 hours. It does not split at midnight, nor when a new campaign tag arrives.
• An engaged visit has at least 10 seconds in view, or at least 2 pages, or a goal reached.
• One person, several browsers. When a person signs in, your site can join their browsers into one person. How a person is counted on a site is a policy an Admin sets through the copilot, behind "Change how this site counts people?".
• Days are UTC days, and the screens say so.

Where the data lives

• Raw events, per-visitor facts and visitor traits live in your site's own database.
• Daily totals are used only when they provably cover the window you asked about; otherwise the answer is counted from the raw events.
• The datasets on Cloudflare's network are our own internal telemetry, not your analytics.

No sampling

• A question asked on screen may read up to 2,000,000 rows and break down by at most 3 dimensions. It shows the top 25 rows by default and 1,000 at most, and a cut tail is flagged.
• A question larger than that is refused, never sampled and never estimated.

Attribution

• First touch (channel, source, medium, referrer, ad platform and campaign) is written once for each visitor and never rewritten.
• Last touch is the latest visit's channel and the latest tagged arrival. The landing page is kept for every visit.
• The classifier reads, in order: the address's own tags; eleven ad-click identifiers from Google, Microsoft, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, Reddit and Snap; the signatures of in-app browsers; then the referrer. It files every arrival under one of eight channels: Direct, Paid search, Paid social, Email, Organic search, Social, Referral and SMS.
• A referrer is kept as a host, the referring site's name, never its full address.

Channel groups

• Your own buckets, as ordered rules: "is", "contains" or "starts with".
• They are applied when a question is read, and never written back into the data, so changing a group never changes history.
• Up to 20 groups on a site, each created behind approval.

Revenue

• Revenue is purchases minus refunds. A refund counts in the period it happened.
• Orders are de-duplicated by their order id.
• Money is never converted, and a window that holds two currencies is refused rather than added up.

Goals

• A goal is a rule evaluated over stored history, so a goal created today also counts the events that came before it.
• An edit that changes what a goal matches gives it a new version and restates its history, and every answer that uses it says so.
• Before you approve it, the "Live backtest preview" shows how many events and visitors it would have matched over the last 1 to 90 days.

Funnels

• A funnel counts unique visitors, or sessions, at each step.
• Each step is the earliest qualifying event after the step before it, inside a window that starts at step 1 and lasts from 1 to 92 days.
• The order can be ordered, strict or any, and one exclusion event can be set.

What drives drop-off

Behind "why?" on a funnel step, every signal is tested in the same way.

• On screen, a finding reads as a sentence: how many times more or less often one group went on to the next step, how many people it rests on, and, when it rests on few, that it is an early signal to treat "as a hint, not a conclusion".

Retention

• People are grouped by their first-ever activity, by day, week or month: up to 31 days, 26 weeks or 12 months.
• Each share is its own row's cohort, never the site's total.
• A person who is erased leaves every cohort.

Alerts

• An alert watches a threshold, or "The baseline": the average of the last 6 windows and their standard deviation, with at least 3 windows needed, firing at 1 to 6 times that usual swing, 2 by default.
• Windows run from 1 to 90 days. Alerts are checked hourly and fire at most once per window, with up to 50 on a site.
• Email goes through the site's own email connection; without one, the firing reads "Channel silent".

One engine

• One query engine answers the Overview and Reports, the copilot, the CSV downloads and the alert checker. Funnels run on an engine built to the same rules, and Explore's visitor search has its own read path.
• It is deterministic, and there is no AI model in the path of a number.
• The site's boundary cannot even be expressed in a query, so no question can reach another site's data.
• Every answer records its source, the versions of the definitions it used, its population and its currency.

Consent

• The browser sends nothing unless the visitor has allowed analytics.
• Global Privacy Control always refuses. Do Not Track refuses until the visitor makes a choice.
• Under opt-in, without Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, an undecided visitor's landing page is held in their own browser and sent only if they accept.
• A paid order from a shopper who declined is still counted as revenue, without their identity.
• Every answer carries a sentence on who is missing from it.

Bots and previews

• Every event is tagged with a device type, "bot" included.
• Author previews and migration previews are never counted.

Keeping raw events

• For each kind of automatically captured event, you choose how long raw events are kept: 1 to 3,650 days. Unless you choose, everything is kept.
• A day's raw events are deleted only after a completed archive export covers that day.

Statistics in reports

• Comparisons in the Overview and in Reports read as plain differences between periods. The significance tests live in Experiments and in the funnel drivers above.