Website metrics: the 10 numbers worth tracking, free

The website metrics worth tracking are visitors, pageviews, traffic sources, entry pages, time on page, conversion rate, funnel completion, returning visitors, Search Console clicks and impressions, and AI crawler hits. Those ten numbers show how people and bots reach your site, which pages hold their attention, and which visits turn into signups or actions. You can see how the traffic reports look on the demo dashboard, which uses sample data.

The 10 website metrics at a glance

Reach metrics: visitors, pageviews, traffic sources, and entry pages

Reach metrics tell you how many people arrive and where they start. In Clicktag, visitors are counted with a daily salted SHA-256 hash instead of cookies or stored IP addresses. Because the salt is deleted once each UTC day ends, someone who visits on Tuesday and again on Thursday counts as one visitor on each day. Pageviews count every canonical, non-bot page load, including single-page app route changes through pushState and popstate.

Your traffic sources show who sent those visits. Clicktag checks utm_source first, then the source or ref query parameter, and finally the referring hostname. Same-site navigation is excluded rather than mislabeled as direct traffic, while visits with no referrer and no UTM tags appear under Direct / none. Country domains for Google search are grouped under google.com, while gemini.google.com, ChatGPT (utm_source=chatgpt.com), Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot show up as their own sources.

Entry pages show the first page a visitor lands on that day. In Clicktag you see them by breaking a goal down by entry page, which tells you which blog posts, docs, or landing pages bring in the visitors who convert.

Engagement metrics: time on page and returning visitors

Many tools lean on bounce rate, which GA4 defines as the share of sessions that were not engaged (an engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event, or has 2 or more page or screen views). Clicktag does not report bounce rate and measures time on page directly: it sums duration increments for each human pageview and takes the median of all pageviews lasting 5 seconds or more. The median and the 5-second floor keep accidental tabs and instant exits from skewing it.

Returning visitors show whether people come back. Clicktag measures retention without cookies by running a once-a-day return check through the browser's HTTP cache.

• Daily totals split your traffic into new and returning browsers.
• Weekly cohorts (starting Monday) group first-time visitors and track how many return across up to 12 follow-up weeks.
• The retention curve plots your overall retained share alongside your best and worst cohorts.
• Private windows and browsers that cleared their cache count as new browsers.

Conversion metrics: conversion rate and funnel completion

In the Goals tab, you can click New goal to track up to 50 goals and funnels per site. A goal matches either a pageview path (is, starts with, or contains) or a custom event sent with window.tt_event(name, metadata, callback). Because goals are computed from data you already collect, a new goal includes your past traffic right away.

Clicktag reports three numbers for every goal: total conversions, converted visitors, and conversion rate. Conversion rate is converted visitors divided by total daily visitors, so a single visitor firing an event five times never pushes your rate above 100%. You can click any goal to break it down by referrer, entry page, country, device, browser, OS, or UTM parameter.

For multi-step flows like pricing page to signup, funnel analytics chain 2 to 6 steps completed in order on the same UTC day. Each step can take up to 6 filters, and the breakdown includes the median (p50_s) and 90th percentile (p90_s) time in seconds between consecutive steps.

A conversion rate based on distinct converting visitors divided by daily visitors stays between 0% and 100%, even when one person triggers the same event ten times.

Search and AI metrics: Search Console and AI crawlers

Analytics scripts only run after a human clicks through to your site and executes JavaScript. Two blind spots happen before that click: search impressions on Google and raw HTML fetches by AI bots.

Connecting Search Console analytics brings your Google queries, clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position into the same dashboard. Clicktag backfills up to 16 months of history on connect, refreshes the trailing 10 days every 6 hours, and puts Search Console clicks next to the same day's google.com pageviews Clicktag measured.

For bots, JavaScript trackers see nothing because GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot fetch raw HTML without running scripts. Clicktag's Crawlers tab reads AI crawler analytics from Cloudflare using a read-only token (Zone Read and Analytics Read) on any Cloudflare plan. It imports 30 days on connect, syncs every 15 minutes, and separates verified bots (checked against Cloudflare's bot categories and published IP ranges from OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Common Crawl, and DuckDuckGo) from unverified hits that only claim a bot's name.

A 10-minute weekly metrics routine

Once a week, run through this five-step check, or set up scheduled email reports (up to 25 recipients per site) to get the summary in your inbox at the local hour you pick.

1. Check the Overview for the last 7 days against the previous 7 days: look at visitors, pageviews, and median time on page.
2. Query the referrers and pages breakdowns with sort=rising in the API, which uses a Poisson margin to rank sources and pages that grew beyond normal noise rather than by raw percentage jumps.
3. Open the Goals tab, review conversion rates and funnel drop-offs, and click your primary signup or checkout goal to compare google.com against chatgpt.com and other sources.
4. Check Search Console for queries with high impressions and low clicks to spot pages that need clearer titles.
5. Open the Crawlers tab to see whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Googlebot fetched your new pages.

FAQ

How many goals and filters can I use in Clicktag?

Each site can have up to 50 goals and funnels combined, and up to 50 websites are included per account. You can apply up to 12 filters at once on dashboard and API reports, and up to 6 filters on each individual funnel step.

Does Clicktag report bounce rate?

No. Clicktag does not report bounce rate, and it has no session recordings, heatmaps, or revenue tracking. For engagement, the dashboard reports median time on page for human pageviews lasting 5 seconds or more.

Why don't UTM term and content or event metadata show up as breakdown dimensions?

Clicktag groups traffic by utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign, while utm_term and utm_content are not report dimensions. Custom event metadata (up to 4,096 characters) is stored by the collector, but reports and the API only group or filter by the event name (up to 256 characters), so put values you want to compare into the event name.

How does Clicktag count returning visitors without cookies?

Clicktag uses a once-a-day return check through the browser's HTTP cache instead of setting cookies or local storage. Browsers that clear their cache, visits in private windows on a later day, or scripts configured with data-retention="false" are either counted as new or skipped.

What do I need to track AI crawlers in Clicktag?

Your site must be verified in Clicktag and proxied through Cloudflare on any plan, including the Free plan. You connect a read-only Cloudflare API token with Zone Read and Analytics Read permissions; Clicktag shows crawler hits by bot and page, and does not block bots.