Why Am I Seeing Weird Looking Campaigns I Didn’t Create?
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
On occasion, you may see campaigns that you didn’t create show up in your Campaigns report.
This is because Independent Analytics Pro will track all campaign URLs that visitors use to reach your site. The Campaign Builder makes it easy to create campaign URLs, but tracking is not limited to those URLs only.
There is an upside and a downside to this. If you’re reading this article, you’ve likely experienced the downside: you can end up with weird-looking data in your Campaigns report due to bot visitors. For instance, you might see a campaign name with random gibberish in it, like “cybbzefbdwefu.”
There’s no harm in these campaigns being present, but if you’d like to limit their occurrence, the best approach is to work on blocking spam bots from your website.
As for the upside, you will also see traffic from real, valuable campaigns that other people are running. For instance, if someone else links to you with a campaign URL from an email newsletter, you will be able to see that. Instead of being unsure why you had a traffic spike, you will know exactly where the visitors came from.
No, Independent Analytics does not include the keywords that visitors entered into a search engine before reaching your site.
This data is proprietary and controlled by the search engines. You can create a Google Search Console account in order to see some of the keywords that your visitors used before accessing your site. Likewise, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools to review keywords your visitors entered into Bing.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
When you purchase Independent Analytics Pro, you will receive an email containing your download link, license key, and your username and password. Your username will be the email address used at checkout.
If you have lost the email with your password or need to reset it for another reason, you can visit the Account page and click the Forgot your password link there. This will take you to a form where you can enter your email address to get a password reset link.
Alternatively, if you still have access to your account, you can change your password by logging into your account, then opening the My Profile menu and clicking the Change Password button there.
If your site is displaying a custom page on the homepage, then the Pages report will display that page’s title and give it a Page Type of Page.
Alternatively, you may be displaying your latest posts on the homepage instead of a custom page, like this:
If that’s the case for your website, then the homepage doesn’t have a title defined anywhere, so Independent Analytics gives it the title Blog, gives it the Page Type of Blog, and displays a home icon next to the page type.
If you are displaying a custom page on your homepage and you’ve selected a different page to display your blog, Independent Analytics will use the blog page’s title and will use Blog as its Page Type, but showing a pencil icon instead.
Now, imagine you have your link patterns configured like this, to track clicks on PDF files:
Clicks on the invoice link would not get tracked because the URL the link points to does not end in .pdf. Instead, it redirects to a PDF file. There is no way the tracking script can know there will be a redirect, let alone where that redirect will lead.
There are two ways you could solve this particular case.
First, if you could remove the redirect and link directly to the PDF file, then it would be tracked with the PDF link pattern.
Alternatively, you could create a new Class link pattern and add the tracked class to the invoice link. Then, it doesn’t matter where the URL leads; when the link is clicked, the class is found, and the click gets recorded.
The important takeaway is that you can’t track a link based on the URL it will be redirected to. You have to track the link based on its URL or by adding a tracked class or ID to it.
Managing License Activations Across Staging and Development Environments
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
If you purchased a license key for 1-3 sites, then you may exceed your activation limit by accident when activating Independent Analytics Pro on staging and development sites.
This guide will help you mitigate this issue, so you can keep your license key activated on your live websites.
Activate your license on your live sites first
Things are easiest when you activate your license key on your live sites first. For instance, if you purchase a license for 3 domains, then activate it on all three of your live sites before you worry about any of the staging or development environments.
Use recognized subdomains and TLDs when possible
Our licensing system recognizes a wide variety of subdomains and TLDs as staging/development environments. If the license is activated on a WP install using one of the recognized patterns, it won’t be counted towards your total activations.
For example, let’s say you’ve purchased IA Pro for 1 website and activated it on example.com. You could also activate it on staging.example.com, and this wouldn’t exceed your 1 website limit.
You can review the full list of recognized patterns here:
If you push your live site to a staging site, you’ll see this notice at the top of the admin dashboard when you login to the staging site:
You can click the Duplicate Website button to identify this site as a duplicate version of the live website. If you click this button or ignore the notice and don’t click any of the buttons, the Pro version will stay activated for two weeks without counting towards your license activation limit.
After that two-week period, you’ll see a similar set of options, but the first button will now say Long-term Duplicate.
If you mark this site as a long-term duplicate, it will activate the license key, counting towards your total activation limit. If you ignore it, Independent Analytics Pro will revert to the free feature set only, and won’t count as a license activation.
If this is a temporary staging site and you don’t want to use a license activation, you can simply ignore the admin notice.
If you have an unlimited site license, you should choose the long-term duplicate option.
Removing sites you can no longer access
There are times when you have a license activation on a site you can no longer access. For instance, imagine you create a staging site, activate the license there, and then delete the staging site. Now, you’re left with a non-existent website taking up one of your activations.
You can resolve this by logging into your account and navigating to the Websites menu. From there, select the site that no longer exists and click the Deactivate button in the License section.
That will immediately free up the activation that the site was previously using.
These tips should make license management easier, but if you still have any issues with your account, please reach out to us via our contact form, and we’ll be happy to help.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
We’ve had some requests to include QR code generation in Independent Analytics Pro, and we would like to include this feature in an upcoming update, but for now, we have an alternative solution.
You can use Short.io to create shortened URLs for your campaign links and generate QR codes. These features are both available on the free plan.
When someone scans the QR code, it opens the shortened URL in their browser, which then redirects to the full campaign URL, allowing Independent Analytics Pro to find and capture the campaign parameters. This will let you see exactly how many people have visited your site from that particular QR code.
If you look at your Referrers report, the Direct referrer is most likely the top result in the data table.
There are a few reasons why a visitor can be attributed to the Direct referrer.
They visited via their browser address bar
Many, if not most, of these visitors are typing your site’s URL directly into their browser address bar. If they have visited your site before, the browser will auto-suggest it to them after typing even a couple of characters into the address bar, which makes it easy to return.
Likewise, they may have a shortcut to your site on their browser’s homepage if they have recently visited.
These are visitors who truly visited your site directly i.e. they didn’t click on a link on another site. However, the Direct referrer also serves as a catch-all when referrer data has been stripped.
The referrer data was stripped
Referrer data is sometimes removed for security or privacy purposes.
For starters, most email clients strip the referrer data from all links, so if you send an email newsletter and someone visits your site via a link in the email, it will most likely show up as a Direct view.
Next, someone may use a privacy-focused browser or browser extension to automatically strip the referrer data from all links they click on.
Lastly, some sites, including those running WordPress, will automatically append the noreferrer attribute to links, which tells the browser not to share the referrer info.
All analytics tools get the referrer data from the browser to find out where a visitor came from. This is the same for Google Analytics, Independent Analytics, and all other website analytics apps.
Is there anything I can do to get more referrer data?
Yes, you can win back some of this data by using UTM parameters when linking to your website, like this:
If you use a campaign link like this in an email newsletter, you would still see traffic show up as Direct in the Referrers report, but you would be able to see exactly how many people clicked on your link via the Campaigns report.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to use UTM parameters whenever you have control over the link.
You can create and track campaign links with the Campaigns feature in Independent Analytics Pro.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
We are not lawyers, and this is not legal advice 🙂
It’s important to understand that the User Journeys feature does not record any data itself. Rather, this feature gives you an interface with a novel way to view and explore your data.
In other words, this feature does not add any new privacy implications on its own, but rather highlights an existing issue, which is the ability to cross-reference data sources.
This is easier to understand with an example, so take a look at this session shown in the User Journeys report:
You could not know who this customer is based on what is shown here (or stored in the database tables).
However, you can see that the order happened at 4:02am, and if you were the store owner, you could easily find which sale took place at that time. For eCommerce transactions, there is also a link to the order page, which removes any ambiguity.
When you view the order page, you can plainly see the personal data of this customer, so there is no longer any question who this visitor is. This essentially makes their data in the User Journeys report personal data as well, by association.
In the User Journeys report, you can see their browsing history on your site from before the sale, their approximate geolocation, device type, browser, and the referrer/campaign info. If they have visited the site before, you may see previous sessions, but identifying individuals over time is not always reliable.
The big picture is that while Independent Analytics Pro does not collect personal data, the User Journeys report makes it easier to cross-reference your analytics data with personal data collected via other means, which can thus turn some data recorded by IA Pro into personal data. Again, this is not a new issue and was always possible via looking at your database tables directly for timestamps, but the User Journeys report makes it easier.
If your site does not collect any personal data, i.e., it has no forms, then this will not be a concern. It will never be possible to identify someone via User Journeys or by examining the database tables directly.
If your site does collect personal data, i.e., you have forms, then it’s important to outline what you track in your privacy policy.
Below every form on your website, you could include a required checkbox that says the user agrees to your privacy policy. In your privacy policy, you could let them know what other data you may be able to find out about them via manual cross-referencing with your analytics. The user can review this information and, once informed, decide whether or not they would like to proceed with submitting the form.
