Pulse: the site’s data in plain words

One screen per site. At the top, four numbers for the last seven settled days or the last four weeks, each against the period before: sessions, outcomes, the share of sessions that ended in an outcome, people. Under them, the sentences: which channel brings the visitors, how many pages carry most of the traffic, where the outcome actually happens and whether that is where the traffic lands, how phones compare, and which pages people reach that the last reading found problems on. Every sentence has a copy button and links to the pages it names.

The sentences describe. "Eighty percent of inquiries come from five pages" is true of a shop with twenty orders a week and of a client with twenty thousand, and needs no statistics to hold. Where a comparison is made, both the count and the rate are given, in percentage points and relative, and a small count is called small rather than compared as if it were not.

On Monday the same sentences arrive as a short mail, seven days against seven, up to three lines that want attention first. On the Agency plan the mail can also go to a client’s address, in the client’s language, and the portfolio screen lists every site with the one that wants attention on top.

Pulse reads a GA4 property. The reading of the site itself is already there.

1. Connect the Google account that can read the site’s GA4 property, on the site’s settings page or on Pulse itself. Search Console and Analytics are separate consents on the same account.
2. Pick the property. If it measures several sites, pick this site’s web stream, so the numbers are its own.
3. Name the key event that counts as the outcome: an inquiry, an order, a signup. Pulse counts everything about the outcome from that event. With none named it counts every key event and says so.
4. Wait a minute for the first pull. After that Pulse pulls once a day, after Google has settled the day, and mails the brief on Monday morning to whoever switched it on.

It is not a dashboard of charts to be read, and not a replacement for Google Analytics: the numbers are Google’s, pulled as Google reports them, with Google’s own notes on sampling and privacy thresholds kept beside them. Nothing is summed that Google does not sum, and a count of people is never added across days or pages.

It does not guess causes. A page with traffic and an open finding is named as a page with traffic and an open finding; whether the finding costs anything is a question the next reading answers, not this sentence. No model writes a number: the sentences are rules in code, and the model, where it is used at all, explains numbers that were already counted.