A quick reference for the core numbers you’ll see throughout PAJ Statistics.
Views, visitors and sessions
| Metric | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Views | Every page view recorded. One visitor reading five pages = 5 views. |
| Visitors | Distinct people, identified by a privacy-preserving signature (not by name). One person browsing all day still counts as 1 visitor. |
| Sessions | A single browsing visit. A new session starts after a gap of inactivity, so one visitor who comes back tomorrow counts as 2 sessions. |
| Pages / session | Views ÷ sessions — how many pages people view per visit. |
Bounce rate
A bounce is a session where the visitor didn’t meaningfully engage — a single page with little time and no real scrolling. A lower bounce rate is generally better.
Most analytics tools decide this with one crude rule: one page view equals a bounce. That rule quietly misfiles your best readers — someone who lands on a single article and reads it for fifteen minutes is recorded exactly like a bot that touched the page and left.
PAJ counts a session as engaged (not bounced) if the visitor viewed two or more different pages, or spent meaningful time on a page, or scrolled well down it. So a one-page visit where someone genuinely read your article is not unfairly counted as a bounce — while reloading the same page five times still is. Because of this, your bounce rate will usually be lower than other tools report, and it will be closer to the truth.
The Sessions screen shows this per visit, alongside an input signal telling you whether a person was even present — see Sessions.
Time on page — measured properly
This is where PAJ Statistics differs from most analytics tools, and it’s worth understanding because your time-on-page numbers will usually be higher than Google Analytics’ classic reports or many other plugins — and that’s because PAJ Statistics measures real engagement time.
PAJ Statistics measures real engaged time — the time a page is open, visible, and being actively used — via lightweight activity “heartbeats” sent from the browser. Time only counts while the tab is in view and the visitor has recently interacted (scrolled, moved the mouse, typed, tapped) — or while embedded media is playing, so someone listening to a track or watching a video is still fully counted without touching anything.
Most other tools instead infer time from the gap between page loads: page B’s load time minus page A’s. That shortcut has two structural blind spots:
- It can’t measure the last page of a visit. With no “next” page load to measure against, the final page of every session is counted as 0 seconds — even if your visitor read it for twenty minutes.
- It can’t measure single-page visits at all. Someone who lands on one article, reads it fully, and leaves is logged as a 0-second bounce.
For a content, media or music site — where visitors often land on one page and stay — that means those tools systematically under-report your most engaged viewers / listeners. PAJ counts that time properly, so a twenty-minute read or listen/watch shows as twenty minutes, not zero. You see the engagement you’re actually earning.
Kept honest
Accurate doesn’t mean inflated. PAJ Statistics:
- gates time on activity — a tab that is open but idle (parked on a second monitor, or held open by an automated browser) stops accruing time about a minute after the last interaction. Reading naturally involves scrolling and mouse movement, so genuine readers lose nothing;
- keeps listeners and viewers counted — while embedded audio or video is playing, time counts even with no interaction at all;
- caps each page’s time at sensible limits, so clock glitches and suspended laptops can’t report implausible durations;
- separates real engagement from noise — average duration reflects only sessions with a measured activity beacon, while session counts and bounce rate include every visit (even the no-activity hits typical of bots). You’ll see this noted right on the Overview dashboard.
In short: other tools tell you the time between clicks; PAJ Statistics tells you the
time visitors actually spent on the page, including the last one. It’s a truer
picture of engagement.
A note on privacy
PAJ Statistics identifies visitors pseudonymously — by a rotating, salted signature derived from their request, not by storing raw IP addresses or personal details. This keeps reporting privacy-friendly while still letting you distinguish new from returning visitors.
Wherever the plugin shows a per-visitor “profile” — the coloured ID chip, the visitor detail page, an abandoned-cart row — that profile is simply everything one signature did, never a record of an identifiable person. There is no name, email or recoverable IP behind a chip; the hash is one-way. Analytics is therefore pseudonymous, not anonymous: real people are counted, but they are never named. See Settings & Privacy for consent modes, IP anonymisation, geography granularity and data retention.
The same honesty affects your counts in the opposite direction: because bots are filtered before counting, views and visitors may look lower than other plugins report. See Why your numbers may look lower than other plugins.
Next: Overview dashboard →