The words we use, and what we actually mean by them
Beltmar reads audience behavior in plain language, but the terms still need defining somewhere. This is that page — eight core terms, and the research that came out of each one.
Actor
An actor is simply a person (or anonymous visitor) being tracked. We're not interested in who they are personally — only in how they behave: what they read, how often they return, and whether their engagement is warming up or cooling down. Every actor has a journey.
Journey
A journey is one person's path over time: what they looked at, when they came back, and whether they went deeper or lost interest. It's their story on your site — no grades or scores, just a clear view of how their attention moved. Journeys show individuals; cohorts show patterns across many.
Cohort
A cohort is a group of people who behave in a similar way. We don’t group by age, job title, or location — we group by what they do: "people who keep coming back and read a lot about a few topics," or "people who browse once and drift away." Each cohort gets a short, readable description, not a segment ID.
Theme
Themes are the topics or areas of your content — pricing, onboarding, product features. We look at which themes show up in someone's journey or across a cohort, which shows what people are actually focusing on, without ranking or scoring your content against itself.
From the research
Warming / cooling
Warming and cooling describe the direction an actor's engagement is moving — not a score. An actor is warming when visits, depth, or return frequency are increasing, and cooling when they're pulling back. Neither is a verdict on its own: a flatline can look like loyalty, and a quiet actor can still be reading closely. It's a trend, read alongside the journey it came from.
Engagement score
An engagement score compresses a visit into one number — time on page, clicks, scroll depth. Beltmar doesn't lead with one, because the same number can mean opposite things: high time-on-page can mean genuine interest or confusion, and a strong score this month can hide an account that's actually cooling. Where a dashboard would show a score, Beltmar shows the pattern behind it.
Attribution
Attribution is knowing where a visit actually came from — and increasingly, whether it came from a person at all. Bot and AI-crawler traffic can look identical to a real reader in a raw pageview count. Beltmar filters for authentic visits before any pattern gets read, rather than after the fact.
From the research
Daily Brief
The Daily Brief is Beltmar's narrative summary of how your audience shifted in the last day — who's warming up, who's gone quiet, and what's worth doing about it — written to be read as a short brief, not a dashboard you have to interpret yourself.
See these terms applied to a real site
The demo walks through an actual actor journey, cohort, and Daily Brief — not a mockup with placeholder data.