Audience breakdowns

A document's read sessions are grouped into eight breakdowns: referrer, source, device type, browser, country, viewer mode, reading hour, and link variant. Every breakdown counts sessions, not page views or bytes served. All of them are Basic and above, except the variants breakdown, which is Pro.

Referrer breakdown

The referrer breakdown shows where readers clicked to reach your file. Raw referrer URLs are normalized to their hostname, so all links from the same website group together. Sessions that arrived with no referrer header are counted as "Direct". The dashboard lists the top ten referrers by session count.

Source attribution

The source breakdown attributes each read session to the channel the reader arrived through. The viewer reports the channel from the ?via= parameter on the link, and the server accepts exactly four values — anything else, including a missing value, is stored as link:

• link — a shared link with no ?via= tag, and the fallback for any unrecognized value
• qr — a QR code scan; the generated QR image encodes the share link with ?via=qr
• email — a link EveryPage sent: share by email and tracked email invites both append ?via=email
• embed — a view through the /embed/ viewer, which reports embed for every session it starts

Email invites additionally carry an ?i= token identifying the individual recipient. That attribution is separate from the source breakdown: it names the reader in the session list, which is a Pro surface.

Device and browser breakdowns

Both breakdowns are derived from the session's User-Agent header. The device breakdown sorts readers into mobile, tablet, bot and desktop — desktop is the default for anything the parser does not identify as one of the first three. The browser breakdown lists the top ten browser names, with sessions whose User-Agent yields no name grouped as "Unknown".

Geography

The "Top locations" breakdown shows the ten most common reader countries. Country is resolved by an in-flight lookup when a session starts: the address goes to the geolocation service, the country name comes back and is written to the session row, and the IP itself is never stored. Sessions that cannot be resolved are labelled "Unknown"; private and loopback addresses resolve to "Local". For details on how EveryPage handles IP addresses, see Encryption and privacy.

Viewer mode distribution

The viewer mode breakdown groups sessions by the viewer mode the reader was served — standard, flipbook, magazine or swipe. A document has one mode at a time, set by you, so this breakdown is a record of what was in effect when each session ran: after you switch a document from standard to flipbook, the split shows how the readership divides across that change. Sessions that reported no mode count as standard.

Peak reading hours

The "Reading hours" heatmap counts sessions by day of week and hour of day, bucketed by session start time and labelled in UTC. It is not converted to your account's local time, so read the grid with that offset in mind.

Link variants breakdown (Pro only)

When you create link variants to share the same file with different recipients, each session records the variant it arrived through. The variants breakdown returns, per variant, its UUID, its recipient label, the number of sessions, the average read time, and whether the variant is revoked or its label redacted. It is Pro-only, it is served with the rest of the file's readership data, and it is omitted entirely for files that have no variants.

Accessing breakdowns

Breakdowns come back with the file's readership data (GET /api/v1/files/{uuid}/readership) and, apart from variants, each has its own card on the readership page. Basic and Pro accounts get all of them except variants, which needs Pro. Free accounts get the summary cards only; the underlying sessions are still recorded, so upgrading exposes the breakdowns for reads that already happened.

Pro accounts can also download the per-session rows and captured contacts through CSV export. That export is a session-level dump, not a copy of the breakdown tables.