Beacon is Lede’s own analytics system. Every Lede publication collects its own audience data — page views, clicks, content gate impressions, sign-ups, purchases and cancellations — and stores it in a warehouse that only your publication can read. You read that data in the Analytics tab of the Publisher App.
Because Beacon is first-party, it is not blocked the way a third-party analytics tag often is, and it is joined directly to your customer records in Lede. The reader who saw three articles and hit a paywall is the same record as the person who subscribed a week later.
Everything is an event
Beacon does not collect a fixed set of pre-computed reports. It records individual events, each stamped with the page, the article, the anonymous visitor, the session and the campaign it arrived from. Every report in the Analytics tab is a query over that event stream, which is why new questions can usually be answered without changing anything on your site.
The events collected today include:
- page_view — one per page a reader opens, including navigation between articles without a full page reload
- click — tracked links and buttons
- view_content_gate and dismiss_content_gate — a registration wall or paywall shown, and closed
- sign_up, login, logout and customer_verified
- view_item_list, select_item, begin_checkout and add_payment_info — the steps of the subscribe flow
- purchase, gift_purchase and gift_redeemed
- subscription_canceled, subscription_undo_cancel, subscription_upgrade and subscription_downgrade
- sponsorship_click
How visitors and sessions are counted
Two identifiers do most of the work.
Unique Users
Lede stores a random anonymous ID in the reader’s browser. It lasts a year and is refreshed on every visit. Unique Users is the count of distinct IDs in the period you are looking at.
The visitor ID is stored per publication and per browser. A reader who visits two Lede publications is counted as a separate visitor on each one. Clearing site data, using private browsing, or switching browser or device also produces a new ID. Beacon does not stitch a person together across devices — the only durable person-level identity is a logged-in customer account.
Sessions
A session is a single visit. It ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, and the next event starts a new one. Unlike Google Analytics, a Beacon session does not reset at midnight and does not restart when a reader arrives from a different campaign.
Unique Users and Sessions are approximate and not additive. Do not add up the daily Unique Users column to get a figure for the month: a reader who visited on three days appears in three daily rows but is one visitor for the month. Change the date range instead and let the report do the counting.
What Beacon does not count
- Readers who have not consented. If your publication shows a cookie or consent banner, nothing is collected until the reader accepts analytics. Publications without a banner collect from the first page view.
- Traffic that does not run JavaScript. Events are sent from the reader’s browser, so search engine crawlers and feed readers that never execute JavaScript never appear in Beacon.
- Bots are not filtered. Automated traffic that does run JavaScript is counted like any other visitor. If you see an unexplained spike, it is worth checking it against your server or CDN logs before treating it as audience growth.
How current the numbers are
Beacon is not a real-time dashboard. Events are loaded into the warehouse in batches, and the Analytics tab caches each query for up to six hours on top of that. Expect the figures to be several hours behind, and treat the most recent day as incomplete. This is why the date filters default to ending yesterday rather than today.
All dates are UTC. A “day” in every report runs from 00:00 to 23:59 UTC, not from your newsroom’s local midnight. Keep that in mind when you line a Beacon figure up against a publishing time in your own timezone.
Why purchases are collected twice
Roughly one in seven checkout events never reaches Beacon from the browser — readers close the tab as payment completes, or a privacy extension blocks the request. Lede’s payment system therefore reports every purchase a second time from the server.
The subscription and revenue reports read a merged, de-duplicated view of these two sources, so a purchase is counted exactly once no matter which route it arrived by. You do not need to do anything about it — it is worth knowing only because it explains why purchase counts in Beacon can be higher than what a browser-only analytics tool reports.
Where to find it
Beacon reports live in the Analytics tab of the Publisher App. See Accessing the Analytics tab for how to get there and how the controls work.
The standalone Beacon dashboard at app.ledebeacon.com has been retired. Everything it did is now in the Publisher App, alongside your customer, product and settings data.