Once your site is verified and traffic is flowing, here's what each part of the dashboard tells you.
Lands you on a list of all your sites with today's session count and a verified/unverified badge per site. From here you click into individual site analytics.
Per-site dashboards
Each site has six analytics views. Pick the one that answers what you want to know:
- Summary — Top-line totals (page views, sessions, visitors, new visitors), the traffic-over-time chart, engagement card, and a traffic-sources breakdown including AI assistants. Best starting point.
- Live Dashboard — Visitors on the site right now, with their location and current page. Refreshes every few seconds.
- Visitor Activity — Per-session log: every visit with country, ISP, browser, referrer, pages viewed, time on page, scroll depth, quality score. Filter by quality or engagement.
- Traffic Insights — Engagement scoring grouped by traffic source. Which referrers actually send good visitors, not just visits?
- Reports — Tabs for Locations, Traffic Sources, Pages, System (browser/OS/device), Engagement, Campaigns (UTM + AI breakdown), Conversions.
- Goals — Define what counts as a conversion (URL match or custom event) and watch the rate.
Reading the Engagement card
The Engagement card on the Summary page splits visits into three buckets:
- Engaged — viewed 2+ pages and not flagged as a bot. These are real readers.
- Bounced — viewed exactly one page and left.
- Bot Sessions — flagged by our quality scoring; excluded from the rate calculations.
"Engagement rate" is engaged / (engaged + bounced). High bounce rate isn't always bad — it's normal for blog posts and search-driven landing pages. It's only bad when your content goal was to send people somewhere else on your site.
Traffic sources
Four buckets, color-coded:
- Direct — no referrer (typed URL, bookmark, app open). Blue.
- Search — from Google/Bing/etc. Green.
- AI — from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, etc. Purple. This is unique to HitCounters.
- Referral — from any other website. Orange.
Time zones
By default the dashboard shows times in UTC. Set your time zone on the Settings page — the dashboard will switch to your local time everywhere (charts, daily breakdown, visitor logs).