Lexique

Measurement vocabulary

Hit

The counting unit of your plan. One hit is one page view or one recorded event. The time-on-page measurement and heatmap points do not count as hits.

Page view

Load of a page measured by the script. On a single-page application, every route change counts as one page view. Only the path is recorded, without the URL parameters.

Unique visitor

Number of distinct fingerprints observed over the period. Since the fingerprint is recomputed every day, the same person returning on two consecutive days counts twice over a seven-day period. It is an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

Session, or visit

Series of events from a single visitor with no break longer than thirty minutes. Past that period of inactivity, the next activity opens a new session. A visit that spans midnight in universal time gives two sessions.

Bounce rate

Share of sessions that viewed only one page. A high rate is not always a bad sign: a page that fully answers the question asked mechanically produces bounces. This definition differs from that of Google Analytics 4, which works on engaged sessions.

Pages per visit

Average number of page views relative to the number of visitors over the period. The indicator measures how deeply your site is browsed. Read it alongside the bounce rate, which it naturally complements.

Visit duration

Time during which the page was actually visible, accumulated then sent once when the visitor leaves. A background tab does not count. Abruptly closing the browser can prevent the send: read this duration as a floor.

Entry page

First page viewed in a session. It shows which door your visitors come through, which is often more instructive than the list of most viewed pages. Entry pages are the natural ground for search optimisation work.

Exit page

Last page viewed in a session. A frequent exit page is not necessarily a failure: a confirmation or contact page legitimately ends a visit.

Scroll depth

Proportion of the page height reached by the visitor. The script sends an event at the 25, 50, 75 and 100 per cent milestones, once each per page view. It is the simplest way to know whether your long content is actually read.

Automatic event

Interaction measured with no configuration: click to an external domain, file download, click on an email address or a phone number, scroll milestone. Each one uses a hit.

Custom event

Event that you trigger yourself through a script call, with a free-form name and optional properties. It serves to measure what matters in your business: sign-up, quote requested, trial started. Twenty properties at most are kept per event.

Visibility trigger

Rule defined in the site settings that sends an event when a designated element appears on screen, once per element. A variant fires the event as soon as an element matches the selector, a form switched to its sent state for example. No line of code has to be added to the site.

Conversion goal

Page path or event name that you designate as a result to track. The dashboard shows its volume, the visitors concerned and the trend. It is a count, not a step-by-step funnel.

Referrer

Site from which the visitor arrived, passed on by the browser. Only the domain is kept, never the full URL of the originating page. The absence of a referrer reads as direct traffic.

Acquisition channel

Grouping of sources into broad families: Direct, Organic, Social, Ads, Email and Referral. Classification relies on campaign parameters where they exist, on the referrer domain otherwise. The channel answers the question of where traffic broadly comes from, the source that of where it precisely comes from.

UTM parameters

Parameters added to a URL to identify a campaign: source, medium and campaign name. They are read by the script and stored in their own fields, independently of the page path. The campaign medium is what determines classification as Ads or as Email.

Real time

Number of distinct visitor fingerprints active over the last five minutes. It is a snapshot of the moment, useful on the day of a publication or a newsletter send. A zero does not indicate a failure, only the absence of a recent visit.

Heatmap

Representation of where clicks and cursor movements concentrate on a page. Positions are normalised, grouped by cell and counted per screen format. No identifier is attached to the points: replaying a visit is impossible.

Compliance vocabulary

GDPR

Regulation (EU) 2016/679 on the protection of personal data. It governs purposes, legal bases, retention periods, security and the rights of individuals. It applies as soon as processing concerns people located in the European Union.

nFADP

The new Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, in force since 2023. Its principles are close to those of the GDPR, with procedural differences and a supervisory authority of its own, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner. It concerns people located in Switzerland.

ePrivacy

Directive 2002/58/EC, transposed in each country, which governs in particular access to information stored on the user's device. It is its Article 5(3) that requires consent for cookies and trackers. It applies in addition to the GDPR, not instead of it.

Consent exemption

Situation in which audience measurement can do without prior consent. The conditions are cumulative: strictly statistical purpose, no cross-matching and no transfer to third parties, no tracking between sites, anonymous statistics. It is up to the site publisher to demonstrate that they are met.

CMP

Consent management platform, that is the tool that displays the banner and stores visitors' choices. It remains useful as soon as a site loads trackers subject to consent. It is not required for cookieless audience measurement alone.

Controller

Entity that determines the purposes and means of processing. For the audience measurement of your sites, that is you. On that basis you carry the information of visitors, the record of processing activities and the assessment of the legal bases.

Processor

Entity that processes data on behalf of the controller, on their documented instructions. Pulsar acts as processor for the audience data of your sites, within the meaning of Article 28 of the GDPR. A processor cannot decide on a new purpose on its own.

Sub-processor

Provider that the processor itself calls upon, a hosting provider for example. It must be bound by equivalent obligations and made known to the client. The list is kept up to date as part of the data processing agreement.

DPA, or data processing agreement

Contract required by Article 28(3) of the GDPR between a controller and its processor. It sets the subject matter, the duration, the nature of the processing, the security obligations, the rules for sub-processors and what happens to the data at the end of the service. It is published and binding, with no prior request.

Legal basis

Legal ground that makes processing lawful: consent, performance of a contract, legal obligation, legitimate interest, among others. Every purpose must rest on an identified legal basis. For audience measurement, it is the controller who determines it.

Legitimate interest

Legal basis resting on an interest of the organisation, balanced against the rights and freedoms of individuals. It requires a written balancing test and is not a catch-all. It is frequently relied on for strictly statistical audience measurement.

Pseudonymisation

Processing that replaces identifying data with a technical identifier, without removing every possibility of linking back. Pseudonymised data remains personal data under the GDPR. It reduces the risk, it does not take you out of the regulation.

Anonymisation

Irreversible processing that makes linking back to a person impossible, including through cross-matching. Truly anonymous data falls outside the scope of the GDPR. The threshold is demanding, and the word is often used wrongly in place of pseudonymisation.

Minimisation

Principle that the data collected must be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary. In practice, it means not collecting a piece of data simply because it happens to be available. Truncating the IP address and dropping URL parameters are two direct applications of it.

Adequacy decision

Decision of the European Commission recognising that a third country offers an essentially equivalent level of data protection. Transfers to that country can then take place without additional safeguards. Switzerland benefits from such a decision.

Supervisory authority

National body responsible for overseeing the application of data protection law, and recipient of complaints. The CNPD in Luxembourg, the CNIL in France, the Data Protection Authority in Belgium, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner in Switzerland. An authority can investigate, issue formal notices and impose penalties; it does not certify tools.

Technical vocabulary

Pixel, or measurement script

Small JavaScript file loaded by your pages, which detects page views and interactions and passes them on to the collection server. The term comes from the old invisible images one pixel wide. Here it is not an image but a script loaded asynchronously.

First party

Measurement carried out on behalf of the visited site alone, with no pooling with other sites. It stands against third-party measurement, where a single actor observes a user across many sites. Partitioning per site is what makes first-party measurement effective, and not merely declared.

Third party

Resource or tracker served by a domain other than that of the visited site, often able to recognise a user from one site to another. This is the kind of tracking that browsers are progressively restricting. Pulsar performs no cross-site tracking.

Fingerprinting

Technique that combines many attributes of the device, such as graphics rendering, fonts or extensions, to form a stable identifier without storing anything. It is regarded as access to the device in the same way as a cookie. The Pulsar script does not apply it: reading the declared browser stays deliberately coarse, limited to broad families.

Rotating daily hash

Fingerprint computed on the server from the current day, the site identifier, the truncated IP address and the declared browser. It changes every day and differs from one site to another, which rules out any tracking over time or between sites. Nothing is written on the visitor's device.

Cryptographic salt

Secret value added to the data before a fingerprint is computed. Without it, a third party could test every possible combination to recover the original input. The salt is never sent to the browser or exposed in the data.

IP address truncation

Removal of the most identifying part of the address before any storage: last octet zeroed in IPv4, prefix only kept in IPv6. The full address is never written, not even temporarily. For the duration of a request, it only serves to derive a country code and to compute the visitor fingerprint.

Partitioning per site

Isolation of the data of each measured site, including in the computation of the visitor fingerprint. Two sites in the same account produce different fingerprints for the same person. Cross-matching between sites is therefore impossible, not merely forbidden.

Exclusion list and CIDR notation

List of addresses whose visits are not measured, defined for the whole account or for one site. CIDR notation designates a whole range through a prefix and a length, for example 198.51.100.0/24. The comparison happens on the full address, before truncation, and the exclusion only applies going forward.

Bot filtering

Discarding of requests whose declared browser matches a known bot, before any storage. Requests with no declared browser are discarded as well. The filter is deliberately simple and fast: it removes the bulk of non-human traffic, without claiming to be exhaustive.

Unwanted referrer

Forged request that presents itself as coming from a third-party site, for the sole purpose of making that site appear in your statistics. These domains are filtered on arrival, from a list kept up to date. Without this filter, the traffic sources of a small site are quickly polluted.

Cardinality

Number of distinct values that a dimension can take. High cardinality, typically URLs carrying a unique identifier, dilutes statistics and inflates storage. Dropping URL parameters and keeping only the referrer domain limit this effect.

Sampling

Computing a result from a fraction of the data, then extrapolating. The statistics in your dashboard are not sampled: they are computed on the events actually recorded. Only the cursor movements of heatmaps are sampled, at a rate of one point every 150 milliseconds at most.

Beacon send

Browser mechanism that transmits a small amount of data without waiting for a response, including at the moment the page is left. It is what makes it possible to record the duration of a visit without delaying navigation. If it is unavailable, the script falls back to a standard background request.