Metrics

You want to know	Go to
What did I earn	Overview, then Earnings
Who is on my site right now	Live
Which titles are performing	Content
Where my visitors came from	Audience
Which countries watch, day by day	Countries
Whether playback is any good	Video
Which pages people land on and leave from	Reports, Pages
Whether people come back	Reports, Retention
What one visitor did	Audience, then click a visitor

Click any row in any table to filter every screen by it. Clear it in the top bar. Every screen except Live follows the date range and filters.

Audience

Metric	Definition
Pageviews	Every page load and every route change. One visitor reloading a page five times is five pageviews
Sessions	One visitor’s activity in one sitting. A session ends after 30 minutes with no events, and a later visit starts a new one
Visits	The same number as Sessions, under the label the visitors table uses
Visitors	Distinct browsers in the range, by the _ws_uid token, kept 365 days. Same person on a phone and a laptop is two
Visit length	Time between the first and last event of a session. A session with one pageview has no measurable length and counts as zero
Entry page	The first page of a session
Exit page	The last page of a session

Referrer, campaign, country, and device are session-level facts. That is why one visitor can appear under two different sources over a month.

Video

Metric	Definition
Plays	Playback started. One per watch, not one per visitor. Several plays can sit in one session
Validated play	The stricter count that earns. How it is measured depends on your pixel’s site type. See below
Completes	Reached the end of the video
Completion	Completes divided by plays
Avg watched	Seconds actually watched per play. Paused and backgrounded time does not count
Audience retention	Share of plays still watching at each point through the video
Rebuffer ratio	Stall time as a share of watch time. Under 1% is healthy
Time to first frame	Median time from play to the first frame appearing
Playback errors	Share of plays that raised an error
Delivered in HD	Share of plays served at 720p or above

Watch time and completion settle after the viewing session ends. Play counts appear immediately.

Rebuffer ratio, time to first frame, playback errors, and HD share describe your delivery, not your content. High completion with a bad rebuffer ratio means people are putting up with your player.

The shape of the retention curve tells you more than any single number:

Shape	Usually means
A cliff in the first few seconds	Loading or autoplay, not content. Check time to first frame
A steady slope	Normal
A step at the same point every play	An ad break, a slow section, or a bad edit

Live streams (type: 'sport') have no fixed duration, so completion, retention, and the 25/50/75/100% milestones are skipped for them.

What counts as a validated play

On a video site type, read from the player:

• Playback started, and 30 seconds watched or 20% of the runtime, whichever comes first.
• At most 3 per visitor, per title, per day.

On a dwell site type there is no player to read, so it is measured from time on the page. Either of these clears the bar:

• 5 minutes of engaged time on the page, or
• 5 minutes between the first and last event of a session, with at least 3 events in it. The event minimum is what stops an idle tab counting.

At most 1 per visitor, per page, per day, and the page must be one vidstats can identify. The 5 minutes is the default; the vidstats team can set it per account, so check with support if your numbers imply a different figure.

Dwell is the default for a new pixel, which is why a site with a player you control should switch its site type: 5 minutes on the page is a much higher bar than 30 seconds of playback.

Channels

A session is sorted into exactly one channel, decided in this order:

1. Direct, no referrer and no campaign tags
2. Paid, utm_medium is cpc, ppc, paid, display, or similar
3. AI, the referrer is an AI assistant
4. Search, the referrer is a search engine
5. Email, utm_medium is email or newsletter
6. Social, the referrer is a social network, or utm_medium is social
7. Referral, any other site linked to you

Order is why a paid link from Google counts as Paid rather than Search, and why gemini.google.com counts as AI rather than Search. A campaign tag beats the referrer, which is the reason to tag your links.

Direct is usually bigger than expected: links from apps, messengers, PDFs, and any site that strips its referrer all land there.

Retention

Metric	Definition
Cohort retention	Of the visitors first seen in a given week, the share that came back in each later week
Visitor lifecycle	New, returning, and lapsed visitors over time
Stickiness	Daily visitors divided by monthly visitors. Higher means people come back more often

These need weeks of data before they mean anything. A new pixel shows empty cohorts, which is correct rather than broken.

Earnings

Metric	Definition
Latest statement	Your last settled weekly statement. Not tied to the date range
Revenue by site	Earnings split across your pixels
Next payout	The date and amount of your next scheduled payment. Runs weekly. See Get paid

Why totals do not add up across screens

Pageviews, sessions, visitors, and plays run on separate tracks, so they are not subsets of each other. 100 pageviews, 40 sessions, 25 visitors, and 60 plays is consistent.

Plays and validated plays differ for the same reason: Plays counts every start, validated plays applies the thresholds above. Your Plays number is normally the higher one.

Earnings ignore the date range entirely, because they settle weekly. See Get paid.