Question about stats

[markwoon]

I'm trying to pull stats via the API (/api/websites/site-id/stats) and have some questions:

1. According to the docs, uniques is the number of unique visitors and bounces are the number of returning visitors. Apart from the fact the bounces variable name is very misleading, does that mean that the total number of visitors is uniques + bounces?
2. How does this concept of visitors relate to the concept of sessions from the /api/websites/site-id/pageviews API? I assumed that a visitor can have multiple sessions, but that doesn't seem correct as I'm seeing the number of sessions is always less than the number of uniques.
3. Can someone confirm that totaltime is the total time spend by everyone during the perioud on the website? So average time would be totaltime / (uniques + bounces)?
4. What does the change number represent? Change from what? The previous period? This does not seem correct based on the numbers I'm seeing.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Maxime-J]

It's an interesting topic.

Open source offers transparency but it's a bit opaque on that field outside of code.
I do believe there should be a place where all the mechanics are defined.

In the current version (2.10.0), if I don't make any mistakes:

1/ There's obviously an issue in the docs, bounces are not the number of returning visitors.
It's the number of time a visitor has seen only one page of the website in an hour.
(Just mentioning @mikecao so that the team is aware of that).

uniques is the number of visitors, knowing that it corresponds to the number of unique sessions, which leads to your second point.

2/ When someone visits the website, an hash is associated with that visitor, saved as a session id.
A visitor can keep the same session id an all month if its ip or user-agent don't change.

So sessions from pageviews API corresponds to the number of unique session ids in the unit period chosen, hence it corresponds to the number of visitors.

3/ totaltime is the sum of times between two bounding pageviews per hour and per visitor.
Linking that with the first point, that means bounces are excluded

Average time shown by Umami is totaltime / (pageviews - bounces), corresponding to the average time per pageview.

4/ It's a comparison with the same period of time before the start date of the selected one.
You can see an example in that discussion #2497

Hope it helps :)

[mikecao]

@Maxime-J is right, our documentation is not correct. Documentation has been updated.

Currently, a session is equivalent to a unique visitor. But our use of the terminology is wrong. In the future we plan to change this so it's more clear.

The new terms will be:

• visitor: a unique user
• pageview: a single view from any visitor
• session: a period of time spent by a visitor (within a certain window, for example 1 hour)
• totaltime: total time spent by a visitor
• bounces: number of times a visitor visits only one page

[maxiride]

I hope it is still relevant since more than a year has passed.

bounces: number of times a visitor visits only one page

As a developer building SPA/landing pages where there is only one page like domain.com, how can I correctly track bounces? There are no page changes due to the design nature of the site.

From the docs I read:

Bounce rate
A bounce is defined when a visit has only 1 event. A user will enter the website, initially generating a view, then leaving. The bounce rate is calculated by dividing the total number of bounces by unique number of visits.

I've already tried to implement tracker functions on actions performed on the page to increase the events measured, but that doesn't seem to "raise" the engagement from a metric point of view in umami. Bounces are still measured.

Related #3287 #3518

[maxiride]

As confirmed by inspecting the source (if I got it right) only pageview events are considered. So the documentation is outdated/wrong but the comment here reflect the actual implementation.

bounces: number of times a visitor visits only one page

Wouldn't make sense that a bounce is a visit with only one event? Queries could be refactored to count bounces where there are no other events other than the page visit without affecting much of code.

[markwoon]

Thanks for the help! That clears up my questions.

But now I've a few more new ones revolving around the metrics endpoint:

1. Is it possible to distinguish between pageviews and unique pageviews?
2. Is there any way to get query string information? Or is that lost?
3. Is it possible to get more than 100 entries?
4. Even better, can I get metrics based on a partial url? For example, top 20 pages beginning with /foo/?

And for the events endpoint:

1. My assumption was that if I provided optional query param eventName, it would filter results to only events with that name. This does not seem to be the case. Is this user error or bug?
2. How do I pull back the data I sent in with the event?

[markwoon]

I see that question 4 above is addressed in issue #2070.

This is a critical API requirement for us...

[markwoon]

@Maxime-J @mikecao Any thoughts?

[mikecao]

We will be making some updates to the metrics endpoint that should address some of your issues.

1. The new endpoint will return both views and visitors.
2. Query string data is under the query parameters tab.
3. We plan to add paging so you will be able to go through all the records
4. We are adding a search option to filter results.

For events, see https://umami.is/docs/event-data