The Website Visits Liveboard and data model tell you who's coming to your website, where they came from, what they looked at, and which visitors are known contacts. You can filter, drill down, and use the AI Chat to ask questions about any of it.
Quick Reference (Advanced Users) - Click to Expand
- Access: Dynamic/Premium users - Reports > Analytics > Library, search "Website visits w/contacts". Standard users - Reports > Website visits.
- Tabs: Visitors, Page Visits, Contact Matches, and Known Visitors (Dynamic/Premium only).
- Filters: Activity Date, Visit Type, Page Title, Page Domain, Source Type, Source Detail, UTM Parameters, Is Bounce, Is Known.
- AI Chat: top of the Analytics home page or Liveboard. Select the Act-On Website Visits data model first.
- Right-click any data point to filter, drill down, or show underlying data. Click a time axis to change the time bucket.
- Explore a tile: ellipsis > Explore > Replace to swap a measure; Make a copy to save your version.
Accessing the Website Visits data
- Dynamic Business Analytics or Premium AI Analytics users: go to Reports > Analytics, scroll to the Library, and search for "Website visits w/contacts".
- Analytics Standard users: go to Reports > Website visits in the left navigation.
Ask the AI Chat
The AI Chat is the fastest way to get answers about website traffic. From the top of the Analytics home page or from the Website Visits Liveboard, type your question. Select the Act-On Website Visits data model from the dropdown on the left so the AI knows where to look.
The Website Visits Liveboard tabs
The Liveboard has three standard tabs. A fourth tab, Known Visitors, is added for Dynamic Business Analytics and Premium AI Analytics subscribers.
Filters
Filters are the grey pills at the top of the Liveboard. They combine, so a narrow date range limits what you can choose in the other filters, and filters apply to every tab.
- Activity Date: the date range of the website visit.
- Visit Type: the default includes just website visits. You can also include landing pages for a full picture of traffic. Sessions can contain both types. If you filter out one type, you only filter out sessions that are exclusively that type. Mixed sessions still appear, and the page count for each session is not altered.
- Page Title: the URL of the website page, without parameters.
- Page Domain: the page's domain, such as www.act-on.com.
- Source Type: where the visit came from, such as Organic Search or Paid Social. Use this to compare results across marketing initiatives.
- Source Detail: a subcategory of Source Type. If Source Type is Paid Search, Source Detail might be Google Ads.
- UTM Parameters: the UTM parameter name and value on any page. Use this to filter to visits from a specific campaign or source you're tracking.
- Is Bounce: excludes "bounce" visits, where the visitor viewed only one page.
- Is Known: filter to known visitors only, where an email address is attached to the cookie.
Tip: You can also filter from almost any chart. Right-click a data point and choose Filter. For example, in the "Visits from the United States" map, right-click a state to limit the whole Liveboard to visits from that state.
Visitors tab
The Visitors tab reports unique individual visitors to the site. Use it to understand the size and shape of your audience, where they're coming from, and how much of your traffic is already known to you.
- Unique visitors: unique individuals who visited the site, or selected pages and domains, during the time period. Individuals are identified by a cookie, which may or may not relate to a known contact.
- Total Sessions: a session starts when a visitor opens a page and stays active, recording additional page visits, until there are 30 minutes with no activity. We report on the first page in the session, the last page, total pages visited, and session duration.
- Non-Bounce Sessions: a bounce is a session with only one page. A non-bounce session has two or more pages.
- New Visitors: first-ever visits to the domain. A visit is marked "new" the first time we see the cookie, so the date range does not change whether a visit is new.
- Known Visitors: visitors whose cookie is connected to a known contact in your database or lists.
- Anonymous Visitors: visitors who are not yet connected to a known contact.
- Source Type and Source Detail: we classify traffic based on the referrer (the website it came from) plus parameters on the destination URL. Main categories include Organic Search, Paid Search, AI Tools, Direct, and Referral. Details are subcategories, so Paid Social might split into TikTok or Facebook. These are based on the first page of the session.
- Referring Site: where the visitor came from.
- UTM Tracking Parameter name / value: UTM parameters extracted from the visited page, based on the first page of the session.
- Visits from the United States and Countries: extracted from the visitor's IP address.
- Companies visiting: extracted from the visitor's IP address. Actual known-contact company data is on the Known Visitors tab (Dynamic Business Analytics and Premium AI Analytics).
Tip: Any chart with a time axis can be re-bucketed. Click the axis to switch from weekly to daily, or even hourly.
Page Visits tab
The Page Visits tab is about individual page performance, so you can see which pages are being viewed, by whom, and how often.
- Page Views: total views for all pages.
- Unique Page Views: page views counted once per unique visitor.
- Known Visitor Page Views: page views for visitors whose cookie is connected to a known contact.
- Unique Known Page Views: unique page views for known visitors.
- Cookie-to-Contact Matches: when an anonymous visitor first visits the page, they get a cookie. Their visits are tracked via the cookie until we get a match, which usually happens when the contact fills out a form and provides their email, or clicks a link in an Act-On email. At that point the beacon connects the cookie to the email. That's a match.
- First page visit: the first-ever visit to that page for that visitor.
Tip: Right-click any value in a chart to drill down into more detail. To see what's behind long sessions of five or more pages, for example, drill down by Source Type. Often the longest sessions come from Email and Paid Search.
Contact Matches tab
The Contact Matches tab focuses on how visitors turn into known contacts. You can see which emails and forms helped identify contacts, which pages end the website journey, and how visitors begin and end their sessions.
- Contact-to-Cookie Match: how many unknown contacts (cookies) were identified, usually by submitting a form or clicking an email link.
- Contact Match Rate: the number of contacts identified divided by the total number of unique visitors.
- Form Submits: total form submissions associated with the pages you're analysing.
Known Visitors tab
Dynamic Business Analytics and Premium AI Analytics only.
The Known Visitors tab tells you more about visits from contacts you already know.
- Average session minutes: calculated from the start of the visit on the first page to the start of the visit on the last page in the session.
- Known Visits by Industry / Title: uses Audience Center contact data and the standard data fields for Industry and Title.
- Known Contacts Visiting: matches known visitors to Audience Center contacts.
Tip: Want to break down known visits by a different field? Click the ellipsis at the top right of the Known Visits by Industry tile and choose Explore. In the right column, click Replace and pick a different contact field. Save it with Make a copy, or Pin to a new Liveboard.