Other analytics tools watch your website from the outside. Independent Analytics runs on the inside, so it knows more about your site. Instead of listing URLs you may not recognize, the Pages report shows the title of every page.
The data table includes more than a dozen columns you can enable, allowing you to see things like the author and category of any page. You can use the filters to see only posts in a specific category or those published by a certain author.
Use the Page Type column to easily compare traffic between posts, pages, archives, and custom post types.
The Analytics menu is the best place to do serious analysis, but you can find stats in other places too. For instance, there is a dashboard widget, stats in the admin toolbar, and a Views column added to the Posts menu.
The Analytics menu is only accessible to Admins by default, but you can make it accessible to Editors, Contributors, or any other user roles on your site.
You can even give authors access to stats for their own posts only.
Independent Analytics knows which visitors are logged in and what their user roles are. This allows you to ignore visitors with certain roles, like Administrators and Editors, so their activity doesn’t get counted in the stats.
Normally, analytics programs are only aware of your site’s URLs, and that’s how they organize your data. Since Independent Analytics is directly integrated with WordPress, it is aware of your site’s pages and can display data based on those pages, including but not limited to their URLs.
No, Independent Analytics needs WordPress to run on the page in order for it to be tracked.