Real-time visitor ping

Live ping tracking keeps the dashboard truly close to real-time.

• While the tab is open the snippet sends a tiny JSON packet ({ event:"_ping" }) every 30 seconds.
• Pings are not page-views – they are stored separately and aggregated for live statistics.

What do we use them for?

1. Current visitors – The “Realtime” card shows people online right now instead of “last page-view within 5 min” guesswork that all these other less accurate analytics platforms give you.
2. Average time-on-page – We measure the gap between first page-view and last ping or visibility change, so a reader that stays 7 minutes on your blog post is counted correctly even if they never navigate. Other platforms are usually guessing this number.
3. Better bounce rate – A session with several pings is clearly not a bounce even if they only visited one URL.

Overhead is minimal: ~0.2 KB every 30 s ≈ 24 KB for a 1-hour visit – smaller than most favicon files.

Turning it on or off

• Site → Settings → Live Ping Tracking – toggle per site.
• Or add data-l_ping="false" to the script tag if you want to override per environment.

If disabled the script still tracks page-views; live visitor count falls back to “page-view in last few min” heuristic other analytics platforms use.