These three terms come up everywhere in Zenovay — on the dashboard, in your invoice, in API responses. Here's how they relate.
The hierarchy
visitor
├── session (one or more)
│ ├── event (one or more)
│ ├── event
│ └── pageview event ← a pageview is just one type of event
└── session
└── ...
A visitor generates one or more sessions. Each session contains one or more events. Page views are a kind of event — the most common kind, but not the only one.
What each one means
Event
An event is any single action you record. Page views are events. So are custom events you fire from your code, like signup_clicked, pricing_viewed, or cart_added. An outbound link click is an event. A form submission can be an event if you wire it up.
This is the unit your plan's monthly cap counts. When you see "100,000 events / month" on the Pro plan, every single page view, every custom event, every goal completion is one event each.
Page view
A page view is the specific event the tracker fires automatically every time a visitor loads (or navigates to, in an SPA) a new URL. It captures the URL, referrer, and basic device metadata.
If a visitor loads 5 pages, that's 5 page views — and 5 events.
Visitor
A visitor is a unique browsing identity. In Zenovay's default cookieless mode, a visitor is identified by a daily-rotating salted hash of their IP-subnet and User-Agent. The same person on the same day = 1 visitor. The same person tomorrow = a different visitor (because the daily salt rotated).
A visitor can produce many page views, custom events, and sessions in a single day.
Quick numerical example
A visitor lands on your homepage, clicks through to your pricing page, fires a custom pricing_cta_click event, then leaves:
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| Visitors | 1 |
| Sessions | 1 |
| Page views | 2 (home + pricing) |
| Custom events | 1 (pricing_cta_click) |
| Events (billing) | 3 |
If they come back the next day and view 3 more pages without firing custom events:
| Metric | Daily | Cumulative (2 days) |
|---|---|---|
| Visitors | 1 | 2 (different daily hashes) |
| Sessions | 1 | 2 |
| Page views | 3 | 5 |
| Events | 3 | 6 |
What this means for your dashboard
- The "Visitors" card uses the daily-hash visitor definition. If a visitor visits twice in one day, they count as 1; twice across two days, they count as 2.
- The "Page views" card counts every URL load, including the same visitor's repeat visits.
- The "Events" card (and your billing meter) counts every event of any kind.
What this means for your bill
If you're on the Free plan with 10,000 events/month and an average user views 5 pages and fires 1 custom event per visit, that's 6 events per session. You can support roughly:
- 10,000 / 6 ≈ 1,666 sessions per month
If you also track outbound clicks and add a heartbeat ping, that climbs to maybe 8 events per session — about 1,250 sessions/month.