Glossary

The words below mean specific things in Flowtag, and several of them mean something different elsewhere. Each entry links to the page that covers it in full.

A – C

Active (last 30 min)

Live count of sessions that pinged within the last half hour. It ignores the selected date range, which makes it the fastest way to confirm a fresh install is reporting. See Dashboard.

Attribution tag

A utm_* parameter or ref value read from the landing URL and stored on the session. Six are recognised; every other query parameter is ignored. See UTM tags and attribution.

Avg Duration

Mean session duration, averaged over buckets that contain data rather than over all buckets.

Avg Scroll

Mean of the highest scroll depth reached on a path per session. Shows N/A where nobody scrolled.

Beacon

Flowtag's collection endpoint, beacon.flowtagservices.com. Every request the tag makes goes to it, so it must be allowed in your Content Security Policy's script-src and connect-src.

Bot filtering

User-agent checks applied to every request the tag makes, on both the payload's reported user agent and the request header. Matched requests receive a normal-looking success response and are then silently discarded, so crawlers never appear in reports and never consume quota. See bot filtering.

Bounce

A session that ended without meaningful engagement — the visitor arrived, did little, and left. Only closed sessions are counted, because a session still in progress has not finished deciding whether it is a bounce.

Bounce Rate

Share of sessions entering on a path that bounced. Per-path, shown in Page Discovery.

Bucket

The time slice a chart aggregates into. Chosen from the range length — hourly for a single day, yearly for a multi-year range — and labelled on the chart axis.

Catalog

The Event Browser drill-down from event names to property keys to property values, each level searchable and paged. See Catalog.

Comparison badge

The percentage shown next to a metric. On the Dashboard with today selected it compares today against yesterday; on Deep Dive and the Event Browser it splits the selected range in half and compares the second half against the first. It is hidden where no meaningful comparison exists. See Comparisons.

Connect

The Dashboard dialog holding your generated snippet and the site checker.

Consent

Cookie consent, off by default. Granted with flowtag.consentCookies() or automatically from Google Tag Manager's analytics_storage signal. It determines whether a visitor ID cookie exists at all. See visitor identity and consent.

Cookieless

The default mode, in which no visitor ID is stored and visitors are distinguished server-side by a salted hash of their IP address. The raw IP is never stored. Cookieless numbers are directionally correct, not exact.

Custom event

An event you send with flowtag.capture(), carrying a name and an optional flat object of properties. Stored under the event type. See custom events.

D – G

Deep Dive

The report for an exact start/end datetime window, with a sparkline per metric and every dimension plotted over time rather than as a single total. See Deep Dive.

Dimension

An attribute a breakdown is grouped by: browser, operating system, device type, or country.

<direct>

Reserved referrer value meaning there was no referrer — a typed URL, a bookmark, or a referrer the browser stripped.

Entries

Sessions whose first pageview was a given path. High entries alongside a high bounce rate usually means the page attracts the wrong traffic, or does not deliver what the link promised.

Event

One recorded action inside a session. Six types exist: pageview, scroll, click, input, health, and event. Every event is stored with its session, timestamp, and the path it happened on, so any event can be attributed to a page and a traffic source. See Tracking.

Event Browser

The report for working with events rather than visitors: Statistics, Catalog, and Explorer, plus a Feed that is not yet released. See Event Browser.

Event name

The label you pass to capture(). Keep it a small closed set (signup_completed, not signup_completed_pro_annual_2026) and put the varying parts in properties.

Event type

One of the six kinds of event. Distinct from event name: event is the type of every custom event, whatever its name.

Exit Rate

Share of sessions that ended on a given path. A high exit rate on a mid-funnel page means something there stops people.

Explorer

The Event Browser view presenting catalog data as an expandable property tree, optimised for surveying a set of events rather than drilling into one property.

Folder

In Page Discovery, a path segment with children, shown with a folder icon. A path can be both a folder and a page in its own right — /blog gets its own pageviews and also has children.

H – O

Half-open range

How every reporting window is bounded: [start, end). A session at exactly midnight belongs to the day starting at that midnight, and is never double-counted at a boundary.

Health event

An error captured by the tag: unhandled_rejection, window_onerror, or resource_error. Useful for spotting a broken deploy on the same timeline as your traffic — a spike in health events next to a drop in conversions usually explains itself. See health events.

High cardinality

A property with more distinct values than is useful — an ID or a timestamp. Flowtag keeps at most 500 distinct values per property; everything beyond that collapses into (other).

Leaf

A path in Page Discovery with no children. Shown with a file icon and - under Subpages.

N/A

Shown instead of 0 when a metric has no data to compute from — most often Avg Scroll on a page short enough that nobody scrolled.

Organic

Sessions whose referrer is <direct> or one of the recognised search engines and which carry no attribution tags at all. A visitor arriving from a Google ad carries UTM tags and is excluded; one arriving from a Google search result is counted. See traffic source metrics.

(other)

Reserved display value for property values beyond the 500-distinct ceiling. A large (other) bucket means that property is high cardinality and would be better split into a lower-cardinality field.

P – R

Pageview

An event recorded when the tag first reaches the server on page load, and again whenever a ping reports a path different from the last one recorded. This is how single-page apps get per-route pageviews without extra code. Pageviews are keyed on the path only, so /pricing?plan=pro and /pricing are the same page.

Page Discovery

The report that turns recorded paths into a navigable tree, with per-page metrics at every level of your URL structure. See Page Discovery.

Paused

A tracker status in which the beacon tells the tag to stop. No new sessions or events are recorded; existing data is untouched. Pausing is reversible and needs no change to your website's code.

Ping

The keep-alive the tag sends every 6 seconds while the visitor is active, carrying the current path. Pings hold the session open, set its duration, and drive single-page-app pageviews.

Plan limit

The monthly per-organization caps on sessions and events, plus the cap on trackers. Reaching the session limit refuses new sessions while open ones keep working; reaching the event limit keeps sessions opening but discards incoming events. Nothing is queued and backfilled later. See plan limits.

Property

A key/value pair on a custom event. Values longer than 256 characters are stored truncated, and Flowtag keeps at most 500 distinct values per key.

Referred

Distinct visitors who arrived from an external site that is not a recognised search engine, <direct>, or <self>.

Referrer

The page a visitor came from, stored per session as a URL, <direct>, or <self>. On a client-side route change the previous path becomes the new page's referrer.

Returning

A visitor whose first ever session on this tracker predates the selected range. Measured against their entire history, not against the previous period — a visitor whose first session falls inside the range is not returning, however many times they came back within it.

S – Z

Scroll depth

How far down a page a visitor got. Sampled rather than streamed: debounced over a 1-second window, reported only on a move of at least 2 percentage points, and accepted at most once per session every 5 seconds. See scroll depth.

<self>

Reserved referrer value meaning the referrer was the same page.

Session

One visit. Opened when the tag first reaches the server, kept alive by pings, and closed after 30 minutes without one by a job that runs every 5 minutes — so a session can appear open for up to 35 minutes after the visitor leaves.

Site checker

The Check your website step in the Connect dialog. It can fail on sites that inject scripts dynamically even when tracking works; live sessions in your Dashboard are the source of truth.

Snippet

The generated <script> tag, copied from Connect with your tracker ID already filled in. Install it once per page load in a global layout, theme, or site-wide include. See Installation.

Sparkline

The miniature trend line inside a Deep Dive stat card, plotting that one metric across the selected range.

Suspended

A tracker status set by Flowtag for policy reasons. Behaves like paused and cannot be resumed from the Dashboard.

Tag

The Flowtag script running on your site. Distinct from an attribution tag — see terms that get confused.

Tracker

An analytics project tied to one website domain. Its ID is what the script tag sends, and it scopes every session, event, and report.

Tracker ID

The identifier generated at tracker creation, carried by the snippet's data-ft attribute. It cannot be changed, and the tag matches on it rather than on the tracker name — so renaming a tracker never affects collection.

Unique

Distinct visitors, counted as distinct pairs of (visitor ID, hashed IP). A shared office network can collapse into fewer uniques, and a mobile visitor switching networks can produce more.

UTM parameters

utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content — five of the six attribution tags, ref being the sixth.

Visit

One session. Visits counts sessions, so one person visiting three times counts as three.

Visitor

The person behind a session, identified by a cookie ID when cookies are consented to, and by a hashed IP otherwise.

Visitor ID

The random UUID stored in a first-party cookie once consent is granted. No ID cookie exists before then.

Terms that get confused

Five pairs account for most misread reports.

Tag (script) vs. tag (attribution). The tag is the script on your site. An attribution tag is a utm_* or ref value on a landing URL. These docs use "the tag" for the script and "attribution tags" or "UTM tags" for the parameters.

Visits vs. Unique vs. Returning. Visits counts sessions, Unique counts distinct visitors within the range, and Returning counts visitors whose history starts before the range. A first-time visitor who comes back four times today is 4 visits, 1 unique, and 0 returning.

Referred vs. Organic. These are not complements of each other, and a session can fall into neither. Referred counts distinct visitors; Organic counts sessions. Comparing them as shares of one total will not add up.

Event (any) vs. event (the type). "Events" in a metric means all six types together. The event type specifically means custom events you sent with capture().

Pageview vs. Entry vs. Session. One session can hold many pageviews but exactly one entry — its first pageview. A path's Sessions counts sessions that included it anywhere; its Entries counts only those that started there.