Most analytics programs, like Google Analytics, are only aware of the front-end of your site. This means that they know your site’s URLs that get visited and then report the metrics for your URLs.
That’s why a typical URL-based analytics dashboard gives you a list of URLs in its reports:
Independent Analytics is different because it is integrated with WordPress and tracks your pages, not your URLs. This leads to a few key differences.
First, your reports can list your pages by the title, and the URL is just one of the properties.
Second, you can make updates to your pages and those edits will show up instantly in your analytics. For instance, you can rename a page or even change its URL, and those changes will appear in your analytics dashboard without disrupting the page’s metrics.
URL-based tools like Google Analytics don’t understand the concept of pages, so your new URL will be tracked separately making it hard to see how the page has performed before and after the URL edit.
Lastly, Independent Analytics includes additional information about your pages that an analytics package without WP integration doesn’t know about. For example, reports in Independent Analytics can include the page’s author, publish date, and post category (if applicable).
This gives you much richer data for understanding how your website is performing. In the future, even more data will be made available including post tags and custom fields from your custom post types.