This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
If you’ve already purchased a copy of Independent Analytics Pro, you can upgrade your license to include more domains or switch from an annual subscription to a lifetime license.
In order to upgrade, start by visiting the Pricing page. Locate the plan you want to upgrade to and click the Buy Now button to open the checkout modal.
Inside the checkout modal, click the link at the top-right labeled “Enter license key,” and paste your license key into the field there.
Once your license key has been entered, you’ll see a pro-rated discount based on your prior purchase(s). You’ll also be able to continue using the same license key for all your existing sites.
When using a WP plugin instead of a SAAS app for analytics, a common concern is that the database will become bloated with data.
While storage varies from site to site, the amount of space Independent Analytics uses in the database is roughly 200-300MB per million sessions. We find that this volume of data is reasonable for the majority of websites.
If you’d like to limit the amount of data stored in the database, you can enable the option to automatically delete old data.
Data storage does not affect performance
Sometimes, we get messages from users who are worried that storing analytics data in their database will slow down their site. This is not the case.
The amount of analytics data stored in your database has no impact on performance outside of the Analytics menu.
The performance when visitors access your site or when you view menus in your admin dashboard will not be affected because the analytics data is not being queried. It is only when you are viewing the Analytics menu that the data is being queried.
How to Find Your Fastest-Growing (and Slowing) Pages & Traffic Sources
One of the best insights you can draw from your analytics is which pages and referrers are growing or shrinking the most.
With the Visitors Growth & Views Growth columns, it’s easier than ever to find pages and traffic sources like these.
How to find your fastest-growing pages
To see which pages are growing the most, start by clicking the Toggle Columns button in the toolbar. Then check the Visitors Growth box to display it in the table below.
Next, click on the Visitors Growth column to sort by pages with the most growth.
Something you’ll notice right away is that some pages report massive change because their visitor count is low. For instance, a page that got 1 visitor last month and 5 this month will show growth of 500%. This is less significant than a page that grew by 50% because it got 1,000 visitors last month and 1,500 this month.
To address this, you can add a new filter with a minimum Visitors threshold. For instance, here’s how you can require each page to have more than 50 visitors.
Once the data is filtered, you’ll have a much better picture of your fastest-growing pages.
Evaluate your fastest-slowing pages too
It’s just as useful to see the pages with declining performance. This can help you find blog posts that need republishing and signs that your keyword rankings may be dropping.
To find which pages have lost the most visitors, simply click the Visitors Growth column heading again to reverse-sort the table.
Don’t forget to customize the date range
By default, the date range uses the last 30 days, and the growth comparison extends an equal range into the past. This means that if you choose a custom range with 10 days, the growth calculation will compare the preceding 10 days.
How you customize the date range will have a big impact on the growth calculations, and using a longer range will often give you a clearer picture.
For instance, if a page has been losing 10% of its visitors each month for half a year, it will never look that bad in the last 30 days because it will only show -10% growth. Displaying additional months will better showcase this change.
Likewise, it’s important to monitor longer date ranges if you don’t regularly review your page growth. Otherwise, you could have a page grow tremendously more than 30 days ago, and that increase won’t show in your dashboard.
Repeat for traffic sources, geolocations, and campaigns
Now that you know how to find the fastest-growing and -slowing pages, you can repeat these same steps for every other menu.
You can display and sort by Visitors Growth on the Referrers, Geographic, and Campaigns menus. The Referrers menu is especially insightful because it allows you to see how much your traffic from Google has grown/shrunk.
If you’re looking for more ways to find insights with Independent Analytics, check out this tutorial next:
How to Retain Your Analytics Data When Pushing from Staging to Production
Terminology: Your production website is the one your visitors visit. Your staging site is the private copy where you make changes. Pushing your staging site to production means you are replacing your production website with your staging site.
A major difference between Independent Analytics and Google Analytics is that your data is stored in your database, not an external one.
This is great for privacy, but it does give you the added responsibility of safeguarding your data.
If you are not backing up your site regularly, please install a backup plugin or switch to a web host with automated backups immediately!
This will ensure you always have a backup of your analytics data, not to mention all your posts, pages, etc.
Since your analytics data is stored in your WordPress database, it’s easy to migrate and import/export using existing tools.
Where the analytics are stored
Independent Analytics adds numerous tables to your database, all beginning with your database prefix followed by “independent_analytics.”
These tables are subject to change, but will always include the _independent_analytics_ prefix
Since your analytics data is stored in the WordPress database, it will be transferred by any plugin that migrates data between local/staging/production sites. This makes things easy except for when transferring from a staging site back to production.
Make sure the plugin versions match
Before you push from your staging site to production, make sure that both sites are running the same version of Independent Analytics. If one is behind, update it right away.
Pushing from staging to production when the sites use different versions of IA can cause errors that pause tracking and require manual intervention.
Exclude the analytics tables when pushing
The best method is to exclude the analytics tables when pushing from staging to production. This way, you can push all of the files and the entire database, except for the analytics tables. This leaves your analytics untouched on the live website.
The following plugins include the option to choose which database tables you want to migrate:
If you don’t have a way to create a staging site already, we recommend Blogvault and WP Stagecoach, which can create a staging site and have controls for selecting DB tables to migrate.
What if I can’t exclude tables?
Let’s say your host has a built-in option to create staging sites and push them to production, but they don’t have any options to exclude database tables.
There is a simple workaround you can use in this scenario.
First, make sure Independent Analytics is running the same version on both your staging and production sites. Then, use one of the plugins listed above to push only your analytics database tables from the production site to the staging site.
This way, you can check your analytics on the staging site and make sure they transferred successfully, then you can use your host’s option to push the entire site to production. You’ll have all your changes transferred to the live site while retaining all of your data this way.
We use Rocket.net, which can quickly create staging sites, but pushes the entire site back to production. When we are ready to publish the changes we made on our staging site, we use the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin to push the analytics tables from our live site to the staging site, and then use the option in Rocket.net to push the entire staging site live.
What if I don’t want to use one of those plugins?
Using one of the recommended plugins to transfer the analytics tables is the easiest solution, but it can be done manually too.
How to manually export your analytics data
To manually transfer your analytics tables, start by logging into your hosting dashboard and finding the link to phpMyAdmin. Once inside phpMyAdmin, click on your site’s database in the left sidebar. Then, locate the Independent Analytics tables and select them all.
Next, scroll to the bottom of the page and use the With selected dropdown to choose the Export option.
This will immediately redirect you to the Export menu, where you can click the Go button to export the selected tables.
An SQL file containing the selected tables will begin downloading right away.
How to import your analytics data
To import the data, you will have to delete all of the analytics tables in the database first. You will get an error message saying the tables exist already if you try to import them without deleting the existing tables first.
Next, visit the Import menu, click the Choose file button, select the SQL file you downloaded, and click the Go button to import the tables.
If your SQL file is large, it may help to compress the file before uploading. You can zip an SQL file like any other file type to compress it.
Remember, you want to export from the production site and import into the staging site. There, you can ensure it worked well before you push the entire staging site to production.
Downsides of using phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is not that reliable when it comes to exporting and importing data. For small sites, it should work fine, but for sites with larger exports, it can be slow and sometimes fail midway.
Additionally, when you delete the analytics tables, this will cause Independent Analytics to crash until the new tables are imported. This is not a big deal because no one is visiting the staging site, but it’s good to know about this so that you are not concerned if you see PHP errors about missing tables during the manual import process.
For these reasons, it is preferable to use a plugin to migrate the analytics tables for you, which can be faster and more reliable.
Summary
Independent Analytics adds tables to your WordPress database that are already included in any backups or migrations you perform.
This can be an issue when transferring your database from your staging site to your production site because it can cause your analytics data to get overwritten. When migrating in this way, make sure to update Independent Analytics to the same version on both sites. Then, you can push your staging site to production, excluding the analytics tables. Or, push only the analytics tables from production to staging, so that you can transfer the entire staging site to production.
We hope this answers all of your migration-related questions, but please feel free to get in touch if there is anything else you need to know.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
The Real-time analytics dashboard updates every ten seconds.
In order to conserve server resources, the Real-time dashboard only refreshes while you’re currently viewing it. If you are in another tab or not currently using your browser, it won’t refresh until you return to the tab, at which point, it will refresh immediately.
The refresh can take anywhere from 0.1-3 seconds, depending on how quickly your server processes Ajax requests.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
The Real-time dashboard in Independent Analytics shows you how many people are on your site right now, what pages they’re viewing, and where they came from.
You can reach this dashboard via the Real-time menu item. Here’s what it looks like:
What this dashboard tells you
At the top of the page, you’ll see a count of your site’s Active Visitors, which is the number of people who have viewed at least one page in the last five minutes.
It also displays the total number of pages being viewed and the total referrers and countries visitors came from.
Below the Active Visitors count, you’ll see charts showing your site’s views over the last five minutes and thirty minutes. Every time a page is viewed, it will show up in these charts.
Lastly, you’ll find a few Top 10 lists below the charts. They list the ten most popular pages, referrers, countries, and campaigns over the last five minutes.
The entire dashboard, including these lists, updates every ten seconds, and the progress bar at the bottom of the page indicates when the next refresh will take place.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
An Active Visitor is someone who viewed a page on your site within the last five minutes.
This method has its pros and cons, so we’d like to explain these details so you can understand this metric clearly.
How Active Visitors are counted
When someone arrives at your site, they will show up as an Active Visitor for the next five minutes. The drawback to this method is that if they leave in thirty seconds, they’ll still be counted for the full five minutes, and if they read the same page for ten minutes, they won’t be counted as Active after the first five minutes. If that same visitor views another page, they’ll be counted as an Active Visitor again for the next five minutes.
While we could “ping” visitors every ten seconds to see if they are still on the site, this would have huge performance costs. Put simply, each page view could take the resources of 10+ views, eating up a considerable amount of server resources, all just to get a more accurate reading in the Real-time dashboard.
Our method of counting Active Visitors isn’t perfect, but it has zero additional impact on your site’s performance. We use data that’s already been recorded, so it doesn’t take any additional bandwidth or slow down your pages.
Funnily enough, this is also how Google Analytics counts active visitors, so we figured it must be accurate enough for most folks 😉
How to Share Analytics Access with Non-Admin User Roles (and white-label the dashboard)
By default, only admins are allowed to access the analytics.
You can allow other user roles to view the analytics and edit the settings by following these steps.
How to edit user permissions
Visit the Settings menu and locate the User Permissions section.
Here, you’ll see all of the site’s user roles, each with a dropdown set to No access by default. If you want to give a user role access to the analytics, you can click on the dropdown and select one of the other available permissions.
The available permissions are:
No access
View analytics for authored content – they can view stats for their own posts only
View all analytics – they can view all of the analytics and use the Campaign Builder
View all analytics & edit settings – they can view all of the analytics, use the Campaign Builder, create and edit reports, and save changes in the Settings menu
When you’re happy with your changes, click the Save Permissions button to grant access.
You might want to block your own visits even when you’re not logged in. For this reason, Independent Analytics includes the ability to block IP addresses.
Devices with IP addresses that have been blocked can still access the site and use it normally. The only difference is that their activity won’t be recorded in your analytics.
How to ignore an IP
To block an IP address from being recorded, start by visiting your settings page and locate the Ignore IP Addresses section.
Right away, you’ll notice the form is showing you that your current IP address is not blocked. It’s always a good idea to block your own IP so that your activity on the site doesn’t show up in your analytics.
To add your IP, simply click the Block this IP button next to the IP address, and it will be added to the list of ignored IPs.
Lastly, click the Save IP Addresses button to finalize your changes. The notice will now confirm that your IP address is blocked.
It’s worth noting that the IP address comes from your router and not your device, so blocking your IP while at home will prevent traffic from all of your devices from being recorded in your analytics. Likewise, it is a good idea to also block your IP at the office or other places you frequently work from.
If you’d like to track a blocked IP again in the future, click the Remove button to stop blocking it.
IP address blocking works for both IPv4 and IPv6.
Using Wildcards
Independent Analytics also supports blocking dynamic IP addresses using wildcards.
A wildcard (*) will allow any number to take its place. For example, the IP address 76.98.172.122 will be blocked by 76.98.172.*.
Multiple wildcards are also allowed. For instance, that same client IP address would be blocked by 76.98.*.*.
Please use wildcards carefully, as they have the power to unintentionally block more visitors than desired.
Using CIDR notation
Independent Analytics also supports CIDR notation for blocking ranges of IP addresses, which may be preferable to using the wildcard syntax.
Version 2.0 of Independent Analytics introduces a way to create and save your own custom reports.
In the sidebar, you’ll see a few parent reports, such as Pages and Referrers.
These reports cannot be renamed, and changes to them cannot be saved.
Below the parent reports are the custom reports, highlighted here:
These reports can be renamed, edited, and deleted. You can also create as many new custom reports as you want.
Let’s start by looking at how you can create a new report from scratch.
How to create a new report
Each parent report includes a plus button next to it that you can click to create a new report.
Let’s say you want to save a new report that always displays country stats for today. You would start by clicking the plus button next to the Geographic report.
This will create and redirect you to a custom report called “New Report.”
To rename the report, click on its title at the top of the page. This will reveal a small popup where you can enter a new title and save it.
Next, since you want to see data from today, you would open up the date picker and click the Today button.
When saving reports, it’s recommended that you always use one of the ten buttons in the date picker, such as Today and Last 7 Days. These apply a relative date so that no matter when you view this report, it always displays recent data, such as from today. If you click on specific days in the calendar, those same days will be reported in the future.
Once you apply your date, you’ll see a warning icon at the top of the page.
This lets you know that you have unsaved changes, which will be lost if you leave the page. You can click the Save button to finalize your changes.
With the report saved, you can revisit it whenever you want to see your geographic traffic from today.
Before we move on, there is one other way to create new reports.
How to use the Save As button
Sometimes, you’ll find yourself editing one of your reports without any intention of saving your changes, but then you uncover some interesting data, and you realize you want to save this as a new report.
For instance, imagine you’re viewing the Blog Posts report when you decide to add a filter to show posts from just one author. You decide to make this into a new report while retaining the Blog Posts report.
You can accomplish this with the Save As button. All you have to do is click the button, enter a title for the new report, and then click the Save as button in the popup.
The original report will be left unedited, and you’ll find your new report listed in the sidebar.
To summarize, if you want to create a new report from scratch, use one of the plus buttons in the sidebar. If you are editing a report and realize it’d make a good new report, use the Save As button.
What gets saved?
Everything you can change in the interface gets saved in your reports. This includes the following:
Date range
Table column visibility
Filters
Grouping (Geographic & Device reports only)
Table sorting
Chart metrics
Chart interval (hourly, daily, etc.)
How to reorder custom reports
Reordering your custom reports is simple.
All you have to do is click on a report title and drag and drop it into its new location.
How to set a default report
When you visit the Analytics menu, you’ll be taken to the Pages report by default. If you want to change this, start by navigating to the report you want to make the default. Then, click the Make default button in the report header.
You’ll see a star show up in the sidebar next to the report’s name like this:
Now, whenever you visit the Analytics menu, you’ll be redirected to this default report.
How to delete a custom report
If you’d like to delete a report, start by navigating to it via the sidebar.
Once viewing the report, click on the trashcan button at the top right of the page.
This will reveal a small popup asking for you to confirm the deletion. Click the Delete report button and the report will be removed from your site.
