Pageview
A pageview is one load of one page on your website. If a visitor opens your homepage, then clicks to your pricing page, then clicks to your blog, that is 3 pageviews from 1 person. Pageviews tell you how much content is being consumed across your site.
Session
A session (sometimes "visit") groups consecutive pageviews from the same visitor into a single browsing session. Sessions typically end after 30 minutes of inactivity. The same person who comes back tomorrow starts a new session. Sessions are useful for measuring engagement: pages per session, average session duration, bounce rate.
Visitor
A visitor (sometimes "unique visitor" or "user") tries to count distinct people. If you visit a site three times this week, that is 1 visitor and 3 sessions. Visitor counting depends on cookies or fingerprints — and is sensitive to the platform's identification method.
Why the same site shows different visitor counts on different tools
Google Analytics 4 counts visitors using first-party cookies. Plausible and BYOViral count distinct sessions because they do not set cookies. StatCounter counts pageviews and treats every distinct fingerprint within 30 minutes as one. None of these are wrong — they are answering different questions with different definitions.
Which metric should you optimize for?
Most blogs and news sites should watch pageviews (content consumption) and visitors (audience size). SaaS marketing sites should watch sessions and conversion rate. Ecommerce should watch sessions, add-to-cart rate, and purchase events.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Google Analytics show different numbers than my server logs?
Server logs count every request including bots, prefetches, RSS readers and crawlers. Google Analytics filters bots and only counts real human page-loads where the JavaScript fired. Server logs typically over-count by 30-300%.
Why is my "visitor count" lower in Plausible than Google Analytics?
Plausible (and other cookieless tools) define a visitor as a distinct fingerprint within a session window — typically 30 minutes. Google Analytics ties visitors to a long-lived cookie, so the same person across multiple sessions over weeks counts as one. Cookieless tools tend to over-count distinct visitors slightly because two visits 24 hours apart get counted twice.
Is "pageview" still the most reliable metric?
Yes. Pageviews are the closest to ground truth — every analytics platform agrees on what a pageview is. Visitor and session counts depend on identification methods that differ between platforms.
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