---
title: "What counts as a visit, and what we throw away · Product Billboards"
description: "A visitor count only means something if the things it excludes are stated. Sessions, dwell caps, coarse country codes, and why we never store an IP address."
canonical: https://productbillboards.com/blog/what-counts-as-a-visit
site: Product Billboards
---

Notes

# What counts as a visit, and what we throw away

A visitor count only means something if the things it excludes are stated. Sessions, dwell caps, coarse country codes, and why we never store an IP address.

9 September 2026

By [Shantanu Srivastava](https://productbillboards.com/about), Founder

4 min read

Here is that definition applied to a live billboard. The figures below are read at request time, not pasted in when this was written.

Every billboard carries a live seven-day visitor count. A number like that is only worth reading if you know what it excludes, so here is the accounting.

## What we record

- An event type: impression, hit, click, comment or reply.
- A hashed session identifier, so two views from the same session count once.
- A coarse country code, derived from the request and kept at country granularity.
- A dwell measurement in milliseconds, capped at five minutes per sample.
- A device class.

## What we never keep

IP addresses are not stored. They are used in the moment to derive a country code and to rate-limit, and then they are gone. There is no cross-site identifier, no advertising pixel, and nothing sold to a data broker. The full statement is in the [privacy policy](https://productbillboards.com/privacy).

## What gets discarded before it counts

- **Bot traffic** — requests matching known crawler signatures are filtered before scoring. Crawling the site is welcome; being counted as an audience is not.
- **Repeat sessions** — the unique-visitor term counts distinct sessions, so refreshing your own billboard does nothing.
- **Parked tabs** — a single dwell sample is capped at 300 seconds, so a tab left open all afternoon contributes five minutes.
- **Single-origin floods** — not discarded, but heavily discounted by the geographic-diversity term described in [how ranking works](https://productbillboards.com/blog/how-ranking-works).

## Why the number is smaller than your analytics

It should be. This counts sessions that engaged with your billboard on this site, over seven days, after filtering. It is not your site's traffic, and it is not meant to flatter. A count you can defend line by line is the only kind worth putting on a billboard.

Filed under[Measurement](https://productbillboards.com/blog/tag/measurement)[Ranking](https://productbillboards.com/blog/tag/ranking)

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