# Visitors, pageviews, and sessions

> Understand what visitors, pageviews, and sessions count in AttribIQ and why the three metrics answer different questions.

Canonical page: [https://attribiq.com/guides/visitors-pageviews-sessions](https://attribiq.com/guides/visitors-pageviews-sessions)

Category: Web Analytics

Last updated: 2026-09-08

Topics: visitors, pageviews, sessions, web analytics

## Summary

Visitors estimate audience size, pageviews count viewed pages, and sessions group related activity. Compare all three over the same period instead of treating one as a complete measure of growth.

## What this guide covers

- Distinguish visitors, sessions, and pageviews
- Use views per session
- Compare periods consistently
- Understand the cookieless limitation

Visitors, sessions, and pageviews describe different levels of website activity.

## Visitors

Visitors are distinct visitor identifiers observed during the selected period. They are useful for estimating audience size, but they are not verified people.

AttribIQ's cookieless default stores identifiers in tab-scoped session storage. A separate tab can receive a different identifier, and the same person on another browser or device is not automatically joined.

## Sessions

A session groups related activity. Sessions answer questions such as:

- How many browsing periods occurred?
- Which source or campaign started a session?
- How many pages did a typical session include?
- Which events happened in the same journey?

One visitor can have more than one session.

## Pageviews

A pageview records a tracked page load or client-side route view. Pageviews help compare content demand and browsing depth.

For a single-page app, verify that route changes create pageviews and that the integration does not also send a duplicate manual event.

## Views per session

Views per session is:

```txt
pageviews / sessions
```

Use it as a simple browsing-depth indicator. A high value is not universally better: documentation, pricing, and support pages can have very different expected journeys.

## Compare like with like

When comparing AttribIQ with another analytics product, align:

- Date range and timezone.
- Included hostnames and blocked paths.
- Bot and internal-traffic filtering.
- Single-page-app routing behavior.
- Consent and storage mode.

Small differences are expected when tools use different identity and session rules.

## Next steps

Use the [overview dashboard guide](https://attribiq.com/guides/overview-dashboard) for the full report and [realtime analytics](https://attribiq.com/guides/realtime-analytics) to verify incoming traffic.

## Frequently asked questions

### Can one visitor create multiple sessions?

Yes. A visitor can return in another session, and the default tab-scoped storage can also create separate identifiers across tabs.

### Does a page reload create a pageview?

It can. Verify the tracker behavior on your site and check that single-page-app route changes and full reloads are not being recorded twice.