Browse Analytics
Trends explore
The Trends explore compares every Visits KPI with earlier weeks, a typical value, an expected range, and before and after a change. What it covers, what to know when reading it, and every dimension and metric in it.
The Trends explore compares every KPI of the Visits explore across time. On the days you pick, it puts each one beside the same days 7 days earlier and 52 weeks earlier, what those weekdays typically see, and an expected range around that.
Its two parameters, Change date and Days before and after, add a before-and-after comparison around a change, such as a release going out or a campaign launching. Set them in the Parameters panel of the Explorer.
Good to know
- Filter Date to pick the days to look at; every comparison follows them.
- Each comparison is a metric of its own, named after its KPI, such as Visits (7 days earlier), and listed under Comparisons below.
- Only complete days are rows: today is left out, so a period never compares a partial day with a whole one.
- Days are your organisation's, in its reporting time zone, while the Visits explore's are UTC days, so a day's count can differ between the two by the hours between.
- A channel that fell to zero this period still has its row in a table of channels, beside its earlier weeks.
Used on dashboards
Charts on these dashboards are built on the Trends explore:
- Trend and anomaly: what changed and why?: Week over week, Year over year, Unusual days, What drove it and Before and after
Dimensions
The Trends explore has 26 dimensions.
When
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Date | The day being looked at, in the organisation's reporting time zone. Every metric counts the visits of these days, or of the days it compares them with. Time intervals: Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year, Day of the week (index), Day of the week (name). |
Around a change
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Before or after | String | Whether the day is Before or After the change: After is the complete days from the Change date on, as many as Days before and after, and Before the same days that many days earlier, so both hold the same weekdays. Until a Change date is picked, After is the latest complete days. Empty outside them, and on both sides where Kontala had not recorded all of Before. |
A campaign's launch
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign first seen | Date | The first day a visit from an allowed origin arrived by the campaign, as Kontala recorded it: a launch date to pick as the Change date. |
How it arrived
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Channel | String | How the visit arrived, from its first page view: the click id, the campaign medium and the referring domain, in that order of trust, by the rules of Channel in the page view explore. It never changes afterwards, so a visit that arrived directly is Direct, whatever brought the visitor before or during it. The Campaigns explore credits a direct visit's conversion to an earlier visit, or to a campaign that reached the visitor mid-visit; this explore counts every visit as it arrived. |
| Source | String | Where the visit came from: the campaign source its link carried, else the ad network its click id names, else a search engine's name, such as google, else the referring domain, such as facebook.com, else (direct). (not set) is a campaign link that named a medium and no source. |
| Medium | String | How the visit came: the campaign medium its link carried, else cpc for an ad network's click id, organic for a search engine and for Google's free listings, referral for any other site and for Meta's own links, and (none) for a visit with no referrer. (not set) is a campaign link that named a source and no medium, as ChatGPT's do. |
| Source / medium | String | Source and medium together, such as google / organic, facebook / paid_social or (direct) / (none). |
| Campaign | String | The campaign named on the link the visit arrived by. Empty for a visit whose link named none. |
| Campaign ID | String | The ad platform's campaign id the link the visit arrived by carried as utm_id, which a spend file names too and which survives the campaign being renamed. Empty for a visit whose link carried none. |
Where it landed
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Landing page | String | The path the visit began on. |
| Landing hostname | String | The hostname the visit began on, for a property that spans more than one website. |
| Landing page type | String | What kind of page the visit began on, as Page type reads it in the page view explore: the type the site declared, the page type rules confirmed in Kontala, or the page type model where the property lets it answer. Unclassified when none says. |
The visitor
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Visitor | String | Whether this was the device's first visit. Each device has one first visit, in the channel it first arrived by, so first visits add up across channels. Bounded by the device cookie's life, which Safari cuts to 7 days. |
What happened in it
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Engaged | Boolean | Whether the visit did more than glance: two or more page views, or a conversion. GA4 also counts ten seconds of visible time, which Kontala does not measure yet. |
| Converted | Boolean | Whether the visit converted: a purchase, a lead, a demo request, a newsletter signup or a trial start. |
| Micro-converted | Boolean | Whether the visit made a micro conversion: a lead, a demo request, a newsletter signup or a trial start. A purchase is the macro conversion. |
Page
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Referring domain | String | The registrable domain (eTLD+1) of the referrer, so www.google.co.uk and news.google.co.uk are one source and m., l. and lm.facebook.com are one source. Null where there is no public suffix to find, which is how localhost and a bare IP read - Referrer host still carries those. |
Geo
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Country | String | The visitor's country as a two-letter code, such as GB, from their IP address. IP Geolocation by DB-IP (https://db-ip.com/), CC-BY 4.0. A dashboard showing this must display that attribution. |
| Country name | String | The country's name in English, as the Unicode CLDR gives it, read from Country's code; a code CLDR does not name reads as itself. IP Geolocation by DB-IP (https://db-ip.com/), CC-BY 4.0. A dashboard showing this must display that attribution. |
| Continent | String | One of seven continents, read from Country by the UN's regions: North America includes Central America and the Caribbean. Russia is Europe; Turkey, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are Asia, as the UN files them. IP Geolocation by DB-IP (https://db-ip.com/), CC-BY 4.0. A dashboard showing this must display that attribution. |
Browser environment
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Device class | String | Bucketed from window width, not from the User-Agent. A narrow desktop window reads as mobile, which is the honest answer for a layout question; Device type answers the hardware one. |
Browser, operating system and device
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Device type | String | Desktop, mobile, tablet or smart tv, from the User-Agent header, and unknown where it names no platform: the hardware, where Device class is the layout the window's width gives. A tablet asking for desktop sites, as Safari on iPad does by default, reads as desktop. |
| Browser | String | The browser, from the User-Agent header. A browser built on Chromium that does not name itself there, such as Brave, Arc or a desktop app, reads as Chrome. A page opened inside an app reads as the app where it names itself, such as Instagram or the Google app, and as In-app browser where it does not. An app's own screens, from Kontala's SDK, read as App. |
| Operating system | String | The operating system, from the User-Agent header; iOS includes iPadOS. There is no version beside it, because browsers freeze theirs: Windows 11 reports Windows 10 and every Mac reports macOS 10.15. An iPad asking for desktop sites, as Safari on iPad does by default, reads as macOS, and many Android tablets read as Linux the same way. |
Data source and quality
| Dimension | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Site | String | The property the event was sent to, read from the key it was sent with. |
| Allowed origin | Boolean | Whether the page's origin is one its property allows. False marks a development server, a staging copy or another site carrying the snippet, so filter on true for real traffic. A property that lists no allowed origins allows every one. |
Metrics
The Trends explore has 210 metrics.
| Metric | Calculation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | Count | Visits with at least one page view, as the Visits explore counts them. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Visitors | Count distinct | Distinct visitors: today each is a device, from the first-party device cookie, as the Visits explore's Users counts them. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| New visitors | Count | Visits that were their device's first, as the Visits explore's First-time visitors counts them. Read 52 weeks back, near the 400 days Kontala keeps, more visits look first, since their earlier ones are gone. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Page views | Sum | Page views, in every tab, of the visits counted. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Engaged visits | Count | Visits with two or more page views, or a conversion. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Engagement rate | Ratio (%) | The share of visits that were engaged. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Pages per visit | Ratio | Page views per visit, in every tab. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Avg. visit duration (s) | Ratio | Seconds from a visit's first page view to its last, averaged over visits; a one-page visit counts as 0, since nothing measures its time. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Conversions | Sum | Purchases, leads, demo requests, newsletter signups and trial starts, each kind once a visit, as the Visits explore counts them. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Converting visits | Count | Visits with a purchase, a lead, a demo request, a newsletter signup or a trial start. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Conversion rate | Ratio (%) | The share of visits that converted, macro or micro. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Micro conversion rate | Ratio (%) | The share of visits with a micro conversion: a lead, a demo request, a newsletter signup or a trial start. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Purchases | Count | Visits that reached an Order confirmation page. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Leads | Count | Visits that reached a Form confirmation page. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Demo requests | Count | Visits that sent a form typed Request demo. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Newsletter signups | Count | Visits that sent a form typed Newsletter signup. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Trial starts | Count | Visits that sent a form typed Start trial. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Revenue | Sum | Order value on Order confirmation pages, each order once, as the Visits explore adds it up, in the site's own currency. Empty, not zero, where nothing says what an order came to. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Orders | Sum | The orders Revenue adds up, each once. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Average order value | Ratio | Revenue per order. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
| Revenue per visit | Ratio | Revenue over every visit, converting or not. On the days the Period filter picks, in the organisation's time zone, complete days only. |
Comparisons
Each metric above also comes in 9 versions named after it, such as Visits (7 days earlier):
| Version | What it shows |
|---|---|
| 7 days earlier | The same days 7 days earlier: week over week. Empty while any of those days is in Kontala's first recorded week. |
| 52 weeks earlier | The same days 52 weeks earlier, so each weekday meets its own: year over year. Empty until Kontala has recorded 52 weeks before every one of the days. |
| Typical | What these days usually see: the average of the same weekdays in the 8 weeks before, or in as many of them as Kontala has recorded. For a ratio, the same weekdays in the 8 weeks before, or in as many of them as Kontala has recorded, added up before dividing, so a busy week counts for more than a quiet one. |
| Expected low | The bottom of the expected range: 95% of normal periods land between the expected low and high, read from how much the same weekdays varied in the weeks before. Needs 4 weeks of them. |
| Expected high | The top of the expected range: 95% of normal periods land between the expected low and high, read from how much the same weekdays varied in the weeks before. Needs 4 weeks of them. |
| Before | The days before the Change date, as many as after it and on the same weekdays: the Days before and after, or fewer while the change is more recent. |
| After | The days from the Change date on, complete days only: the Days before and after, or fewer while the change is more recent. |
| Before, 52 weeks earlier | The days before the Change date, 52 weeks earlier: what the same weeks did a year ago. Empty until Kontala has recorded them. |
| After, 52 weeks earlier | The days from the Change date on, 52 weeks earlier: what the same weeks did a year ago. Empty until Kontala has recorded them. |