Overview

The Overview page is the first thing you see when you open leadmaps. It gives you a quick, honest read on how your site is doing right now: how many people are visiting, how engaged they are, which pages they look at, and where they come from. Every number is for the date range you pick at the top, and every number is shown next to the same number for the period just before, so you can tell at a glance whether things are going up or down.

Think of this page as the dashboard of a car. You do not look at every detail. You glance at it, see if anything looks off, and then decide where to dig deeper.

What you see

From top to bottom, the Overview page is made of a few clear blocks.

A page title that reads “Overview”, with a small “LIVE” tag next to it. The LIVE tag means the page keeps itself up to date on its own. New visits keep flowing in while you look, without you pressing refresh. Under the title you see the exact date range the page is showing, for example “Last 7 days” with the two calendar dates spelled out.
A row of four big number cards. Each card shows one headline number, a small colored tag that tells you how much it went up or down compared to the period before, the older number for reference, and a tiny line chart (a “sparkline”) that shows the day by day shape. The four cards are:
- Sessions. A session is one visit. If the same person comes back later in the day after a break, that counts as a new session. This is the closest number to “how many visits did my site get”.
- Pageviews. The total number of pages opened. One visit can open many pages, so this number is usually bigger than Sessions.
- Unique visitors. How many different people came, counted once each even if they visited many times. This is the closest number to “how many real people”.
- Avg session duration. The average length of a visit, shown as a time like “2m 14s”. Instead of a line, this card shows a small bar for each of the last few days so you can see the trend.
A wide traffic chart. This is a line that shows your traffic over time across the whole date range. The high points are your busy days, the low points your quiet days.
A “Top pages” list. The pages people opened most in this range, with the busiest at the top.
A “Top sources” list. Where your visitors came from, such as a search engine, a link on another website, or a direct visit (someone typing your address or using a bookmark).

The green or red tag on each card is the comparison. Green with an up arrow means the number is higher than the period before. Red with a down arrow means it is lower. A flat gray tag means there was no change.

How to read it

Start with the four cards, then look at the trend, then look at the lists.

Here is a worked example. Say you pick “Last 7 days” and you see:

Sessions: 12,345, up 12.4 percent, with 10,983 the week before.
Pageviews: 41,500, up 9.1 percent.
Unique visitors: 8,900, up 14.0 percent.
Avg session duration: 2m 14s, down 5 percent.

What does this tell you? More people came this week than last week (unique visitors up 14 percent), and they triggered more visits and more pageviews. That is good. But the average visit got a little shorter (duration down 5 percent). That is worth a second look. It could mean the new visitors are leaving faster, or it could just be that a busy social media link sent a lot of quick, curious clicks. You would then look at “Top sources” to see if a new source appeared, and at “Top pages” to see which page those new people landed on.

The sparkline under each card adds shape to the single number. Two weeks can both total 12,000 sessions, but one might be flat every day while the other had one giant spike on a single day. The sparkline shows you which one you are looking at.

Customize it

Almost everything on this page is driven by the controls at the top and the date range. Here is each one and when to change it.

Date range. Click the calendar button at the top right. You get quick ranges (Last 24 hours, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days) and a custom calendar where you pick any start and end day yourself. Every number, the trend chart, and both lists update to match. Use a short range like “Last 24 hours” to check the effect of something you just launched. Use “Last 90 days” to see the bigger picture and smooth out daily noise. The range you pick stays put as you move around leadmaps, so you do not have to set it again on every page.
The comparison period. You do not set this by hand. leadmaps always compares your chosen range to the period of the same length right before it. So “Last 7 days” is compared to the 7 days before that, and a custom 14 day range is compared to the 14 days before it. This keeps the comparison fair: you are always comparing like with like.
Focus on one source. If you came to the Overview from a source breakdown or followed a link that carried a source filter, the whole page narrows to visits from that one source. This is handy when you want to see how people from search behave without the rest of the traffic mixed in. Clear the filter to go back to all traffic.
Light or dark theme. Use the theme switch in the top bar to flip the whole dashboard between a light look and a dark look. Pick whichever is easier on your eyes. It changes only how things look, never the numbers.
The live stream. Next to the headline pages there is an Events view that shows each event the moment it lands, newest at the top, as a running stream. While the Overview rolls up your data into totals, the live stream is the raw firehose. Open it when you have just put leadmaps on your site and you want to watch the very first events arrive, or when you are testing a button and want to confirm the click is being recorded. The live stream shows the newest 200 events as they come in, so the date range does not apply there. You can narrow the stream to a single visitor when you want to follow just one person’s actions.

Use cases

You run an online store and just sent a newsletter. Set the date range to “Last 24 hours”. Watch Sessions and Unique visitors climb in the hours after the send. Check “Top sources” to confirm the traffic is really coming from your email and not from somewhere unexpected. Action: if the numbers are flat, your email may not have reached inboxes, so check your email tool before blaming the product.
You write a blog and want to know if your audience is growing. Set the range to “Last 90 days”. Look at the traffic chart for a slow climb or a slow drop, and look at Unique visitors versus the period before. Action: if it is climbing, do more of what worked in your top pages. If it is dropping, your older posts may be losing search traffic, so plan a refresh.
You launched a new landing page yesterday. Set the range to “Last 7 days” and open “Top pages”. Find your new page in the list and see how many visits it pulled. Then open the live stream for a minute to confirm events are arriving from it in real time. Action: if the page is missing from “Top pages” and nothing shows in the live stream, the tracking snippet may not be installed on that page, so check the page source.

Tips

The four cards answer “how much” and the comparison tags answer “is it better or worse than before”. Read them together. A big number that is down is a different story than a big number that is up.
A single very high day can pull the average up or down. When a number surprises you, look at the sparkline first to see if it is one spike or a real trend.
“Sessions” and “Unique visitors” are not the same. Sessions counts visits. Unique visitors counts people. One person who comes back five times is five sessions but one visitor.
A short average session length is not always bad. People who find exactly what they need fast also leave fast. Pair it with the funnels and journeys pages before you decide it is a problem.
If the page shows no data and you have only just added leadmaps to your site, give it a few minutes and open the live stream to confirm events are flowing. A brand new site simply has nothing to show yet, and that is expected.