Glossary

What the numbers mean

Analytics words are used loosely, and two tools rarely count the same thing the same way. These are the definitions Skomi uses, the ones its own code implements, so you can read a dashboard and know exactly what you are looking at.

Traffic

Who arrived, what they looked at, and where they came from.

Snippet: The one script tag you paste into a site, once, for every product. Your site's ID is part of the address rather than a separate attribute, because each site is served its own bundle built from the products it has switched on, which is why switching a second one on later changes what the existing tag does without you touching the page again.Read more
Site ID: The identifier in your snippet's address. It is public by design, because it is in the page source of every page you put it on, so it identifies a site rather than authenticating one. Hits are accepted from the domain you registered and its subdomains, and unusual volume from one address raises a traffic alert.Read more
Origin check: The rule that a hit is only recorded if it came from the domain registered against that site, or one of its subdomains. It is why pasting somebody else's snippet into your page collects nothing, and why moving a site to a new domain means telling Skomi about the new one.Read more
Ingestion: The moment a hit arrives and is decided about. Exclusions, bot filtering and self-referral blanking all happen here rather than at reporting time, which is what makes them irreversible: a hit dropped at ingestion was never stored, so no later change of mind can bring it back.
Page view: One load of one page. Skomi counts loads, not unique pages. If somebody opens your pricing page, goes elsewhere and comes back, that is two page views. It is also the unit everything else on your bill is priced against.Read more
Visit (session): One run of activity by one person. A visit ends after 30 minutes with nothing recorded, and anything after that gap is a new visit. So a page view is one page opened, and a visit is the whole sitting. Four page views by one person in ten minutes is four page views and one visit.
Visitor: One person, counted once however many times they visit in the period you are looking at. Skomi works this out on its server from a secret that is replaced every day, so nothing is stored on anyone's device, which is also why the same person counted on Monday and on Tuesday cannot be recognised as the same person across those two days.
Bounce rate: The share of visits where only one page was opened. It is not a measure of whether somebody was disappointed: a reader who found exactly what they wanted on your one good page and left satisfied is a bounce, and so is somebody who arrived by mistake.
Visit duration: How long a visit lasted, measured on the server from when things arrived rather than by a timer in the browser. A visit whose last page is never followed by anything has no end to measure, which is why single-page visits contribute no duration.
Entry page: The first page of a visit, where somebody came in. Useful because it is rarely your home page: most people arrive on whichever page answered their search.
Exit page: The last page of a visit. A high exit rate is not automatically bad. It is expected on a thank-you page and worth investigating on a checkout.
Referrer: The site that linked somebody to you, as their browser reported it. Skomi blanks a referrer from your own site as the hit arrives, so your own pages never appear in your traffic sources. A site is never its own referrer.
Channel (source): The group a referrer belongs to: search, social, or a direct arrival with no referrer at all. A referrer is the single site; a channel is the kind of traffic it represents, so google.com is a referrer and Search is its channel.
UTM parameters: Tags you add to a link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) so you can tell which campaign brought somebody. They are set by you rather than reported by the browser, which makes them the only reliable way to attribute a paid click.
Direct: A visit that arrived with no referrer and no campaign tags. It is not the same as somebody typing your address: bookmarks, links in email and chat apps, some PDF readers and anything that strips the referrer all land here. Read it as "we could not tell", not as "they came straight to us".Read more
Landing page: Another name for the entry page: the page a visit started on. The two words mean the same thing, and Skomi's dashboard says entry page.
Returning visitor: Somebody who has been here before, and on the default setting Skomi cannot tell you which visitors those are. Identity is worked out on the server from a secret replaced every day, so Monday's visitor and Tuesday's have nothing to join them on. Daily figures are exact; anything spanning days counts a person once for each day they came.Read more
Country: Where a visit came from, looked up from the network address as the request arrives. Only the country, region and city are used for reporting; the address is kept with the visit and appears in no report. The one place it is shown is a traffic alert, where it is there so you can exclude it.
Time zone: Yours, not the server's. Every period on every dashboard is worked out in the zone set on your account, so "today" ends at your midnight rather than at UTC's. It is unset until you choose one, and unset means UTC.
Self-referral: Your own site appearing as the source of a visit to itself. Skomi never records one. A referrer on the same host, with or without www, is blanked as the hit arrives, so following an internal link continues the visit it belongs to instead of starting a new one from yourself.
Click ID: The identifier an advertising platform adds to a link it sent you: gclid for Google Ads, msclkid for Microsoft, fbclid, and several more. Skomi reads it to know a visit was paid for even when the campaign tags are missing, records which platform it came from, and then strips the identifier itself out of the stored address rather than keeping it.
Sampling: Estimating a total from a fraction of the traffic. Skomi does not do it. Every visit is counted, on every plan. The word is here because several other tools do sample above a threshold, and because Skomi samples one thing on purpose: session recordings, which is a separate setting with its own entry below.
Bot traffic: Visits from crawlers, monitors and scripts rather than people. They are dropped as they arrive, by matching the browser string against a list kept for the whole platform. The match is a plain substring rather than a pattern, which makes it easy to read and easy to overreach with: too broad an entry silently discards real visitors too.
Traffic exclusion: A rule that stops a hit being recorded at all, by address, path, hostname or country. It applies at ingestion, so an excluded visit never reaches the reports and cannot be recovered afterwards. Keeping your own office out of your numbers is the usual reason.Read more
Same page: Which addresses count as one page. Parameters that only describe where a visit came from (the utm_ tags, advertising click ids and a handful of others) are ignored when pages are grouped, so one page does not split into a row per campaign. The list is a per-site setting and is deliberately cautious: ref, q and id mean something real on some sites, so they are left alone.
Breakdown: A panel that splits the period you are looking at by one dimension: pages, sources, countries, devices. Every row is also a filter: clicking one narrows the whole dashboard to it rather than opening a separate report.Read more
Filter: A condition narrowing every number on the page at once, so the tiles, the chart and all the breakdowns describe the same subset. Filters combine, and the address carries them. A filtered dashboard is a link you can send.Read more
Interval: The size of one step on the trend chart: an hour, a day, a week or a month. It follows the period you chose rather than being set separately, and everything dated on the chart, annotations included, is placed into the same buckets so the marks line up with the line.
Cohort: A group of visitors defined by when they were first seen, followed forward to see how many come back. It is the report that device-free identity cannot produce: following one person across days is exactly what a daily secret makes impossible, so the page says so rather than drawing an empty grid.Read more
Engagement: The pair of measures about attention rather than arrival: how long a page was actually visible, and how far down it people got. Both are reported per page, and both come from the page itself rather than being inferred from the gap between two loads.Read more
Web vitals: Four measurements of how a page felt to load, collected from real visits rather than from a laboratory: LCP (when the main content appeared, good at 2.5s or less), CLS (how much the layout jumped, good at 0.1 or less), INP (how quickly it answered a tap, good at 200ms or less) and TTFB (how long the server took, good at 800ms or less). Each is shown at the 75th percentile, the threshold a site is graded on, so it describes a bad-ish visit rather than an average one.Read more
Annotation: A dated note on the trend chart: a release, a campaign, an outage. It puts the explanation at the point in the chart where the effect shows up, so a step change six weeks later is not something anybody has to remember the reason for.Read more
Saved filter: A set of filters kept under a name so you do not rebuild it each time you ask the same question. It belongs to the site it was made on.
Revenue: Money attributed to the visit that led to it, rather than to the page the payment happened on. The currency is stamped when the payment arrives and Skomi never converts between currencies. A sale in euros is reported in euros beside a sale in dollars, because a converted total is a number that changes with the exchange rate on the day you read it.Read more
Revenue currency: What a site sells in, as an ISO 4217 code. It is used when an event reports a value without saying which currency it is in. Set it once and the amounts your site sends stop being ambiguous, and because Skomi never converts, this decides which column your revenue is reported in rather than what it is worth.
Ad platform: Which advertising system a paid click came from, worked out from the click ID on the link. The platform is stored and the click ID is not, which is enough to file the visit as paid and to name the source, without keeping an identifier that points back at one person's ad interaction.
Goal: Something you have told Skomi to count as a success: a particular page being opened, or a custom event your site sends. A page-view goal counts page loads, so one person reloading a confirmation page counts twice.Read more
Funnel: An ordered set of goals, showing how many people reached each step and where the rest stopped. The value is the gap between steps, not the total at the end.Read more
Event: A recorded occurrence that is not a page load: a goal being reached, a click on an outbound link, a download, a tagged element. Events are recorded alongside page views and, like them, draw on your credit allowance, which is why switching more capture on is a decision rather than a free win.
Conversion rate: The share of a period's visitors who reached a goal at least once. Because the denominator is people rather than events, it cannot pass 100% however many times one person converts, and the count beside it, every occurrence, is the one that can. The gap between the two is repeat behaviour.Read more
Journey: The path visitors took through the site, step by step, rather than one page at a time. It answers what people did before and after a page, which a list of pages ranked by traffic cannot, however long you look at it.Read more
Compare with previous period: A switch that measures every number against the same length of time immediately before it. The earlier period is aligned by position rather than by date, so each point is compared with the point the same distance into its own period: Monday with Monday, not the 3rd with the 3rd.
Outbound link: A click on a link that leads off your site, recorded without you doing anything. On by default: it records something somebody did and nothing about who they are.Read more
File download: A click on a link to a file, recognised by its extension and recorded automatically. On by default, and the list of extensions that count is a per-site setting. A site that sells PDFs wants a different list from one that publishes them.
Form submission: That a form was submitted, never what was in it. Off by default, alone among the automatic captures, and not out of caution about content: "form" also means your search box, your filter panel and your newsletter strip, so on a busy site it is thousands of events a day filed under one name that tells you nothing. Tag the one form you actually care about instead.
404 tracking: Pages that report themselves as not found, recorded automatically so a broken link somebody else published shows up in your reports rather than only in your server logs. On by default.
Tagged element: An element carrying a data-skomi-event attribute, which records an event when somebody uses it. On by default and free until you use it, because nothing on your page carries the attribute until you add one, so a site that tags nothing fires nothing.
Traffic alert: A warning that one address is sending far more than a visitor plausibly would. A site ID is public by design, so anyone who finds it can send hits at it; Skomi watches the volume and offers to exclude the source in one click.Read more

Behaviour

What somebody actually did on the page, rather than which pages they opened.

Heatmap: A picture of a page with the clicks drawn on it, so you can see what people reach for, including things that are not links, which is usually the more useful finding.Read more
Session recording: A replay of what one visitor's screen did: movement, clicks and scrolling, reconstructed from what changed on the page. It is not a video of the person or their camera, and no keystrokes in form fields are captured.Read more
Scroll depth: How far down a page somebody actually got, as a percentage. It answers the question a page-view count cannot: whether anybody read past the first screen.Read more
Time on page: How long a page actually held attention, counted by the page itself while it is visible rather than inferred from the gap between two page views. A tab opened in the background and never looked at contributes nothing, and the last page of a visit still has a time, which is the half that a gap between loads can never measure.Read more
Live view: What is happening on your site at this moment: the visitors on it now, with their sessions playing as they go rather than after they have left.Read more
Masking: What a session recording is allowed to capture. What a visitor types is never recorded, in any setting. There is no switch for that. What the setting governs is the words the page shows them: Strict captures none of it, so a replay is layout and interaction with no text; Balanced hides what looks like personal data; Relaxed captures page text and is the default. Individual elements can be masked, or exempted, in your own markup.Read more
Recording sample rate: The share of visits that get recorded, from 0 to 100, set per site and starting at 100. This is the one place Skomi samples deliberately. Recording every visit to a busy site spends credits without telling you anything the sample does not.Read more
Global Privacy Control (GPC): A signal a browser sends on the visitor's behalf to say they have opted out of tracking; several US states recognise it in law. Skomi can honour it per site, and it is off until you decide. With it on, a request carrying the signal is answered with nothing recorded, checked on the server, so it applies however old the copy of the script in that browser is. It governs heatmaps and recordings, which is the part of Skomi the signal is aimed at.Read more
Click map: A heatmap of where people clicked. One of three views of the same page. The others are how far down they scrolled and where their attention went.Read more
Attention map: A heatmap of where people's time went rather than where they clicked. It shows which parts of a page actually held somebody, which is frequently not the part with the buttons on it.Read more
Block selector: A CSS selector whose matching elements are never captured by session recording at all: not masked, not blurred, simply absent from the replay. A per-site list, for the region of a page that should not leave the visitor's screen.Read more
Heatmap backdrop: The picture of the page a heatmap is drawn over. It is taken from a real recorded visit to that page, matched on both the path and the query string, so a heatmap of a page that renders differently per query is drawn over the version it is describing.Read more

Apps

The same questions for software people install, where there is no URL and no browser.

Screen view: The app equivalent of a page view: one screen being shown. An app has no URL, so the screen name your SDK reports is what appears in reports, which makes naming screens consistently the single most useful thing you can do when installing an app SDK.Read more
Crash-free rate: The share of app sessions that finished without a fatal error. Skomi never reports more than 100%, and where a crash happened before the app's first screen the figure errs slightly pessimistic. A stability number that flattered itself would be worth nothing.Read more
App version: The release an app was running when it reported. Every screen view and every error carries one, which is what lets you see whether a bad release is bad or whether the problem was already there.
Crash: A fatal error the SDK reports as the app stops. It is what makes a session count against your crash-free rate. An error the app caught and carried on from is not one.Read more
SDK: The package an app includes instead of pasting a script tag. There are eight (Android, iOS, Kotlin Multiplatform, Flutter, React Native, Unity, .NET and Electron) and they all speak the same wire format, frozen at version 1, because you can change a site's script this afternoon and you cannot make somebody update an app.Read more
Offline capture: What the SDK does when the device has no connection: it keeps what it collected and sends it once there is one. An app measured only when it has signal is an app measured only in cities.Read more
App: A piece of software people install, registered separately from a site and counted separately against your plan. It has no address and no referrer, so it is measured by an SDK rather than by a script, and only Analytics reads an app. Heatmaps, recordings and feedback are site products.Read more
Entry screen: The first screen of an app session, the app's answer to an entry page. It is often not the one you designed as the front door, because a notification or a deep link can start a session anywhere in the app.Read more
App ID: The identifier an SDK is started with, the way a site ID is part of a snippet's address. One app, one ID, counted separately from any site on your account.Read more
Platform: Which kind of device an app session happened on: Android, iOS, desktop. It is a breakdown of its own because a release can be fine on one and broken on another, and a single crash-free rate across both would hide it.Read more
App referrer: Which app sent somebody to yours. Android delivers it as a package name, com.google.android.gm for Gmail, so what is stored is the package, and the dashboard shows the app's name in its place. The stored value and the filter keep the package, because that is the thing that is actually unambiguous.Read more

Feedback

Three words people use interchangeably, for three different things.

Submission: One message from one visitor: their rating, their words, and the page they were on. A submission is private to your inbox and is never published. Nothing you do to it puts it in front of anybody else.Read more
Topic: An item on a public board, written by you. Topics are the only thing a board shows. A submission never becomes one on its own: turning a customer's message into a topic is a decision you take and words you write.Read more
Board: A public page listing your topics, where visitors can vote without an account. The votes are anonymous, and the key that stops one person voting twice is kept indefinitely, and deliberately so, because forgetting it would quietly reopen the ballot.Read more
Widget: The thing on your page that asks visitors for feedback. It has six positions to choose from, it can be switched off per site, and it arrives in the same script as everything else rather than as a second thing to install.Read more
Inbox: Where submissions arrive. It is private to your account: nothing in it is public, and nothing in it becomes public on its own.Read more
Rating: The score a visitor leaves with a submission. A rating with no comment is a real and common submission rather than an empty one, and it is counted as such.
Spam: A submission scored as junk and filed away rather than shown. Skomi records which signals fired, so a wrong verdict can be understood rather than guessed at, and a submission marked as spam is never announced by email.
Webhook: A URL Skomi calls when something happens in Feedback, so another system can react to it. It is the whole integration story, with no Slack app and no Jira plugin, and a webhook is what you point at whichever of those you already use.
CSV export: Your feedback submissions as a file you can open elsewhere. Values that begin with a formula character are escaped on the way out, so opening the file in a spreadsheet cannot run something a visitor typed into your widget.
Prompt: What a feedback widget asks. Six kinds: NPS (0 to 10, "how likely are you to recommend"), CSAT (1 to 5 satisfaction), CES ("how easy was it"), a single emoji reaction, open text with no rating, and a structured bug report. Every feedback pattern worth having collapses into one of them.Read more
Trigger: When the widget appears: always visible, after a delay, on exit intent, after an action, or only when the visitor opens it themselves. The last is the quietest and the one that annoys nobody.Read more
Target: What a piece of feedback is about: the site as a whole, one page, one element on a page, or one piece of media. It is why the product is called Feedback rather than Site Feedback: a new kind of thing to give feedback on is a new target, not a new module.
Status: Where a submission has got to in your inbox: New, Triaged, Resolved or Spam. It is yours to move; nothing changes it on your behalf except the spam scoring on arrival.
Notification email: An email when a submission arrives, sent to the address on your account. There is no second address to configure. It is off until you switch it on, per site, and spam is never announced.

Your account

The words that appear on your bill and in your settings.

Cookieless: Measuring visitors without storing anything on their device: no cookie, no local storage. Skomi derives identity on its server from a secret replaced daily, which is what removes the need for a consent banner in front of your analytics.Read more
Credit: Skomi's unit of use. One page view is one credit, and everything else (events, recordings, app screens) is priced against it. One allowance covers every product on the account, so a site and an app draw from the same balance.Read more
Overage: What you pay for credits used beyond the allowance your plan includes, charged per block rather than per credit. A plan can be set to stop instead of to overspend, and the free plan is.Read more
Shared dashboard: A read-only link to one site's numbers that needs no account, for a client or for people who should see the figures without a login. The link is the credential: anybody who has it can open it, and revoking it is how you take the access back.Read more
Digest: A site's numbers summarised and emailed on a schedule, to people who do not open dashboards. Every one carries its own unsubscribe link.
API token: A key for reading one site's numbers from outside the dashboard. The query API and the MCP server both use it. One token covers exactly one site, so there is no way to widen its reach by accident.Read more
Site: One domain you have registered, with its own ID and its own numbers. Subdomains of it are accepted by the same site; a different domain is a different site. Skomi calls it a site everywhere, in the settings, in the addresses and in the API, so there is only ever one word to look for.Read more
Product: One of the four things Skomi does: Analytics, Behavior and Feedback for a site, and Analytics for an app. You switch on the ones you want, per site, and they share one allowance instead of arriving as four subscriptions.Read more
Member: Somebody you have given access to one site or one app. View reads the statistics; Manage also changes settings. Neither is everything the owner can do. Deleting, adding members, minting API tokens and creating shared links stay with the owner.Read more
Plan: What you subscribe to: an allowance of credits each month, a number of sites and apps, and how long each kind of data is kept. The figures for each one are on the pricing page, which reads them live rather than repeating them.Read more
Allowance: The credits your plan includes each month. Everything metered draws on the same one, so recording more sessions and measuring more pages compete for one balance rather than turning up as separate bills.Read more
Metered unit: A thing that draws on your allowance: a page view, a recorded session, a submission. Each has a rate in credits, and the rates are published on the pricing page. One allowance covers all of them, which is what makes recording a sample of traffic a choice about spending rather than a second subscription.Read more
Overage cap: A ceiling on what you are willing to spend beyond your allowance in a month. Reach it and metering stops rather than continuing to bill, which is the safe answer for a site that might be linked to from somewhere large overnight.Read more
Billing interval: Whether you pay monthly or annually. Both are real prices rather than the same price divided differently, and the pricing page states how many months of the monthly price a year costs, as arithmetic rather than as a claim.Read more
Currency: What you are billed in. A plan carries a price per currency rather than one price converted at today's rate, so what you pay does not move with the exchange rate, and the same is true of the revenue Skomi reports back to you.Read more
Discount: A code that reduces what a subscription costs, for a set number of payments or for as long as it runs. Monthly and annual can be discounted differently, because they are separate prices.
Affiliate: Somebody who sends customers to Skomi and earns a share of what those customers pay. The rate and how many payments it runs for are agreed individually rather than posted, and attribution is a cookie on Skomi's own domain rather than anything on your site.Read more
Two-factor authentication: A second step at sign-in, either an authenticator app or a code by email. Which one you chose is stored, so you are asked for the method you set up rather than being offered every method each time.
MCP server: A way for an AI assistant to read your numbers in words. Connect Claude or Cursor and ask about your traffic. It reads and never writes, and it authenticates with an API token, so it can only reach the single site that token covers.Read more
Deleting a site: Removing a site removes everything it recorded (statistics, recordings, feedback) from every store Skomi keeps them in. The purge runs first, and if any part of it fails the deletion is abandoned rather than leaving data behind with nothing pointing at it.
Retention (two different things): The report shows whether visitors come back: people who first arrived in one week, and how many of them returned in the weeks after. The window is how long Skomi keeps your data before deleting it, which your plan sets. The figure for each plan is on the pricing page. The same word, two unrelated meanings, and they appear in different places for different reasons.Read more

Now go and look at your own numbers

Every term above is something Skomi shows you about your own site or app, with no cookie banner in front of it.

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