Let's Talk Traffic Stats

The Visits stats on your dashboard are almost live...they update constantly, but run a little behind real time. These stats show us Unique Visits, not the number of page loads for a lens. Each visitor is counted once every 7 days. If they come back again later that day, for example, you will not see your total increase. It’s also important to note that when you are logged in your visits to your own lens do not get added to your total.

The number you see is based on a 7-day rolling window. This is not where you find out the lifetime visit total for a lens. We can see that stat on the individual Traffic statistics for each lens. From your dashboard select the Stats link and take a look at the Traffic tab. You will see Life of lens just above the title Traffic Sources.

So, what is a 7-day rolling window? It continually shows you how your lens is doing for a 7 day period. The visit count can go up and it can go down. Seeing traffic decline is normal. Don’t panic, your stats aren’t broken. ;) If you first promote a lens it’s can get a rush of traffic…once that rush drops off the count, if you haven’t been getting the same steady traffic each day after that the drop can be pretty significant.

Let’s look at an example:
Unique Visits per day (at the same time of day)

Day 1: 127
Day 2: 131
Day 3: 116
Day 4: 34
Day 5: 55
Day 6: 21
Day 7: 5
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We’d see 489 on our dashboard.

If the following day you receive 8 visits it looks like this:

Day 1: 131
Day 2: 116
Day 3: 34
Day 4: 55
Day 5: 21
Day 6: 5
Day 7: 8
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We’d see 370 on our dashboard. That 127 has dropped off, and we picked up the new number 8. This process happens around the clock.