A visit
A visit is one recorded page view. A session is one person’s visits within a 30-minute window: several pages in one sitting are several visits in one session. Someone who comes back later is a returning visitor. The campaign funnel counts sessions, so its “visits” stage is one per session: a person who comes back after 30 minutes counts again. Stage counts visits as pages are served, not with a script in the visitor’s browser. Bots, crawlers and monitoring tools are filtered out. Members editing the site are not counted.Engagement
A small piece of the page reports, when the visitor leaves, how long they stayed, how far they scrolled, and which named buttons they pressed. That feeds read depth and the engaged stage of the campaign funnel: a second page, 30 seconds, or half a page scrolled.Consent
Visitors in the EU, the EEA and the UK are not counted until they accept the site’s consent prompt. If they decline, nothing is recorded. Visitors elsewhere are counted without a prompt. The prompt itself is part of your site’s design. Google Analytics, if you use it, follows the same answer when Require cookie consent is on under Settings, then Integrations. With it off, Google’s tag loads before consent.What is never stored
For your privacy page
Copy this into your privacy notice, next to whatever you already say about cookies:
This site measures how it is used with Stage, a first-party analytics service. It sets a session cookie (30 minutes) and a random visitor id cookie (stage_vid, 13 months, set once and never extended) so we can count returning visitors and see which pages lead to an enquiry. The id is sent to Stage and to Stage’s analytics data processor, who act on our behalf. It is not linked to your name or email unless you contact us, is never used for advertising, sold, or matched across other websites, and is deleted when you decline measurement. Measurement data is kept for 13 months. Where the law requires it, nothing is set until you accept the cookie prompt.
AI assistants
AI crawlers and assistants are counted separately, whatever the consent setting, because they are not people. See AI activity.Next steps
Analytics
What the Performance tool shows.
Inbox and people
When a visitor becomes a person.