In your owner area, My activity → Live shows a map. Each glowing dot is a place where someone is looking at your website, right now. It is a strange thing to see the first time: your gîte exists for people you have never met, on a Sunday evening, four hundred kilometres away.
A dot is a place, not a person
Positions come from the network serving your website, and they are rounded to a tenth of a degree before anything is stored — about ten kilometres. Two visitors from the same town make one dot, simply brighter. Nobody is followed from one dot to the next, and two pages read by the same person are two rows that cannot be tied together.
A dot goes out five minutes after the last page view. That is deliberate: the map answers "who is here now", and nothing else. A dot still lit means somebody is still there.
What is never recorded
No IP address is read or kept. No cookie is set — which is also why your website has no consent banner to display. Nothing is stored for more than twenty minutes: after that, only a number of page views for the day remains, which nobody can turn back into a person.
Your own visits do not count. While you are signed in to your owner area you are invisible on your own map — otherwise it would mostly show you.
"Someone is on the payment page"
When that line appears, a booking is under way: the guest filled the form and is on the bank's page. The dates are held meanwhile, and nobody else can take them. If the payment does not go through, they are released on their own and the stay appears under Abandoned carts, where you can write to that guest once.
What it is actually for
Three uses, none of them decorative:
- Seeing the effect of a post. You publish a photo on Instagram: dots arrive in the minutes that follow, or they do not. That is more honest than a count of likes.
- Knowing where they come from. The list under the map says what brings you the world — a search engine, a social network, a booking platform, or your address typed directly.
- Feeling the season start. January visits do not look like June ones, and you see it before it turns into bookings.
For everything else — how many visitors this month, how many bookings, the commission you did not pay — read the Statistics page instead.