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How are the unique visitors counted?

A short article about counting new visitors

A unique visitor is a site visitor or a lead uploaded via API with certain parameters:  cookies, browser, OS and other properties or events. Unique visitors will be considered in quota if they were active in your payment period (current month).

Visitor activity is: 

  • any event or property recorded;
  • visitor visited your site;
  • you recorded data via API;
  • visitor responded to your email;
  • visitor followed the link to your site from the message.

If visitors go to your website after they:

  • cleared cookies;
  • entered from another device (and didn't share their contact details so that the system could merge them with the existing lead card);
  • reinstalled the browser or OS,

they are considered as a new unique visitor.

Please note: when visitors who haven't been active in the current payment period are sent manual and triggered messages, they will be counted in the unique visitors quota only if they perform the following actions with the message:

Please note: when visitors who haven't been active in the current payment period are sent manual and triggered messages, they will be counted in the unique visitors quota only if they perform the following actions with the message:

  • answered the message
  • clicked on the link in the message

The visitor won't be counted in the quota if they:

  • read the message (but didn't reply or go to the site via the links in the message)
  • mark the message as spam
  • unsubscribe from your campaigns
  • receive the Double Opt-In letter
  • don't receive the messages as they bounce

For example: 

You send out a manual campaign to 1000 leads:

  • 580 leads read the message
  • 320 leads answer
  • 100 proceed to visit your site via the link from the message
  • 12 unsubscribe from your campaigns

Only those who replied to the message and followed the link will be counted in the quota of unique visitors. At the same time, if one lead performs two actions at once (responds and follows the link in the message), they will be counted only once.

If the quota is exceeded, you'll get the overrun total added to your regular payment invoice. It will be deducted in the end of your payment period The cost of each visitor over the quota depends on your payment plan and can be found here.


The service recognizes visitors' cookies, but this can be customized so that a visitor with unrecognizable cookies would be merged with a user Dashly already knows. This can be accomplished by assigning this visitor with a user id (this should be done on your side) and sending user ID into the service. Afterwards, Dashly will be able to recognize this visitor when they authorize on your site, even if they come with different cookies (or via different devices) or after the interval of 150 days (after the cookies storage period for cookies expires).

You can merge visitors by user ID if your site has sign up functionality.

We’re using “User ID” to merge visits from different devices. Once the visitor is authorized in your system, you need to send his ID to Dashly, using this method:

dashly.auth('25', 'hmac-sha256-hash');
First argument is User ID. Second - hash HMAC SHA 256 ()

The text for hashing is User ID, the key is User Auth Key, which you can find it in the Admin panel.

Example in PHP:

 $userId = '...'; $hash = hash_hmac('sha256', $userId, 'User-Auth-Key' ); echo "dashly.auth('".$userId."', '".$hash."')"

More details can be found here.

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