Reading the Captivar Dashboard — A Tour of Every Tab

The dashboard is where you’ll spend most of your time inside Captivar. It exists for one job — make it obvious, at a glance, whether each client site is doing what you set it up to do. This article is a tour of every section, what each number means, and how to read the dashboard like the people who designed it.

The three controls that shape every view

Three controls at the top of every page change what the rest of the dashboard shows. Get familiar with them before you dig into any specific section.

The site switcher

Top-left, just under the logo. A dropdown of every site on your account. Pick a site and the entire dashboard scopes to that site. There’s also an All sites option that aggregates numbers across your full portfolio — useful for the founder check-in but not for working a specific client.

The site switcher remembers your last selection per device, so opening the dashboard the next day puts you back where you were.

The time window selector

Top-right of most pages. Five preset windows: Today, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days, All time. Every chart, KPI, and list respects this window. Numbers change when you change it.

The default is Last 30 days — long enough to smooth out daily noise, short enough to feel current. For day-of operational work (looking at today’s leads, monitoring an active campaign) drop to Today or Last 7 days.

There’s also a custom date range — click “Custom” in the time window dropdown and pick two dates. Useful for client reports that need to match a specific month or campaign window.

The compare toggle

Sits next to the time window selector on pages where comparison makes sense (Overview, Pages, Sources). Flip it on and every KPI shows the change vs the previous equivalent window — “Last 30 days vs the 30 days before that.” Green for up, red for down, percentage shown next to the number.

Sidebar — the seven sections

The left sidebar groups everything into seven sections. They’re listed in roughly the order you’ll use them after a site is set up.

Overview

The home page. KPIs across the top, charts below.

The KPIs are the four numbers that matter most:

• Visitors — unique people who hit the site in the window. One cookie per visitor. A visitor who returns next week counts once.
• Sessions — separate visits by those visitors. A visitor who comes back three times is one visitor and three sessions.
• Leads — captured contacts in the window. Forms + chat + bookings combined.
• Catch Rate — leads divided by visitors, as a percentage. The single most important conversion metric on the platform. Covered in depth in Traffic Sources and the Catch Rate.

Below the KPIs, two charts:

• Visitors over time — a daily bar chart for the selected window. Tall bars = high traffic days. Look for patterns (Mondays vs weekends, post-campaign spikes, slow drift).
• Catch funnel — a horizontal funnel showing visitors → engaged → leads → bookings. The narrowing tells you where in the funnel the leak is. A site with strong visitor counts but a sharp drop at engaged means people aren’t staying. A drop between engaged and leads means the receptionist or form is the bottleneck.

Live

Real-time activity. Every visitor currently on the site appears as a card with their country, device, the page they’re viewing, and how long they’ve been there.

Live updates every 5–10 seconds. Cards appear when a visitor lands, slide along when they move pages, fade out when they leave.

This is the page to keep open during a campaign launch, a webinar, or any high-activity event. Watching live activity makes it obvious within a minute whether things are working — a tracker install confirms here before any KPI updates.

Visitors

A list of every visitor in the time window, paginated. Each row shows country, device, browser, source channel, page count, time on site, and whether the visitor was identified (chat or form gave us a name + email).

Click any row to open the visitor detail — every page they viewed, every event they fired, every session in order. Covered in Visitors and Journeys.

Pages

Top pages by visitors, sessions, and engagement. Default sort is by visits descending — what’s pulling the most traffic.

Two columns to pay attention to that aren’t on most analytics tools:

• Engagement — average time on page in seconds, plus the percentage that scrolled past the fold. A page with high visits and low engagement is doing the SEO job but not the marketing job.
• Catch contribution — how many leads came from sessions that touched this page. Helps you spot pages that aren’t the biggest by visits but are the biggest by conversion impact.

Leads

The lead pipeline. Kanban view by default — columns for new, contacted, qualified, closed_won, closed_lost. Cards represent individual leads. Drag cards between columns as you work them.

This is the page agencies open most often after a site is running. It has its own deep-dive article — Working the Lead Pipeline.

Receptionist, Forms, Bookings

Three sections for the three conversion tools. Each section has both a configure view (the settings that shape behavior) and a review view (the conversations, submissions, or bookings that resulted).

• Receptionist — configure the AI assistant + review every chat conversation
• Forms — build forms + see every submission per form
• Bookings — calendar settings + every confirmed booking

These were covered in their own configuration articles. The dashboard’s job here is to surface what’s happened — every chat transcript is readable, every submission is exportable, every booking can be cancelled or rescheduled from the dashboard.

Settings

Per-site settings — IP exclusions, notification emails, tracker behavior, privacy options. Account-wide settings (profile, billing, team members, branding) live under your name in the top-right, not in the sidebar.

How the numbers fit together

A small mental model that makes reading the dashboard much easier.

Every event in Captivar lives in one of three layers, each stacked on the one below:

1. The raw layer — visitors and sessions. Every tracker hit creates or updates rows here. This is the foundation; everything else is derived.
2. The engagement layer — page views, scroll depth, time on page, custom events. Built from raw events, surfaced in Pages and the Catch funnel.
3. The conversion layer — leads, chats, form submissions, bookings. The smallest layer by volume, biggest by business value. Surfaced in Leads, Receptionist, Forms, Bookings.

When a number on one page doesn’t match a number on another, it’s almost always because they’re at different layers. “Visitors” on Overview is the raw layer. “Lead source: organic = 12” on Sources is the conversion layer. Both can be true and consistent even if 12 looks small next to 1,200.

A few practical reading habits

Some habits that turn the dashboard from “stares at numbers” into “knows what to do”:

Look at compare before you look at the absolute number. A 30% drop in visitors is the story; 8,400 visitors is just a number. Compare reveals movement.

Hover the KPI tile. Every KPI has a tooltip explaining how it’s calculated. Especially helpful for Catch Rate, which is dependent on how the site is configured.

Filter the Visitors list by identified to find people you can actually contact. Anonymous visitors are a big number for vanity; identified visitors are the ones who matter to revenue.

Watch the funnel shape, not the individual bars. If the funnel pinches sharply between engaged and leads, the receptionist isn’t doing its job. If it pinches between visitors and engaged, you have a bounce/UX problem the platform can’t fix.

Cross-reference the time window. If today looks weak, check this week. If this week looks weak, check this month. One bad day is noise; one bad month is a problem to solve.

What you don’t need to look at every day

A common mistake when starting out is treating every number on the dashboard as equally important. It is not.

If you’re checking in on a working site once a week, four numbers are enough:

• Visitors (this week vs last)
• Leads (this week, raw count)
• Catch Rate (this week vs last)
• Lead pipeline status counts (how many in new + contacted, to see if the agency is working leads fast enough)

Everything else is diagnostic — you go look at it when one of the four above tells you to.

What happens next

The dashboard is the surface. The next two articles go deeper into the two analytics views agencies use most: how to read individual visitor journeys, and how to use UTM attribution and the Catch Rate to understand which channels are actually working.