This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
Since website analytics are used to measure visits from anonymous guests, recognizing them over long periods of time is difficult. How long Independent Analytics is able to recognize the same visitor depends on a few factors.
If a visitor accesses your site from a different device, browser, or IP address, they will not be seen as the same visitor.
For this reason, visitors are often recognized during the same day and even over a few days, but recognizing the same visitor over months is extremely unlikely.
You can set the salt token to refresh every day if you want to ensure visitors can’t be recognized for more than 24 hours for privacy reasons.
There is little that can be done to improve how long visitors can be recognized while adhering to a privacy-friendly policy. In fact, even if cookies were used, visitors still would not be recognized if they changed browsers or devices, or simply cleared their cookies.
When analyzing your user journeys, understand that if you see a few sessions over the course of the week, this user may have accessed your site from another device, browser, or IP address as well. And it is possible that they first visited your site months ago, but have since changed their device, browser, or IP address.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
When someone visits your site, they eventually leave. Everything they do while on your site is included in one session.
With the User Journeys report, you can view every single one of these sessions:
When you visit the User Journeys report, you’ll see the most recent session at the top. Each session includes essential data so you can analyze it at a glance.
These are the data points included in each session:
Session Start: The time that the visitor first arrived at your site.
Pages Viewed: The number of pages the visitor looked at during their session.
Duration: How long the visitor was on your site.
Conversions: Indicates whether there was a click, form submission, or eCommerce order recorded during the session.
These data points make it easy to pick out interesting sessions to explore further. To learn more about a session, all you have to do is click on it, and the timeline will be revealed.
The Pages Viewed and Duration values are color-coded, so sessions with higher engagement use a darker orange, and less engaged sessions use a lighter orange.
Exploring the timeline
When a session is clicked on, it reveals a complete timeline of the visitor’s experience on your website.
It begins with the date of their arrival and the site they came from, followed by each of their views. Every view includes a timestamp, the page they viewed, and how long they viewed that page.
You’ll also notice that clicks, form submissions, and eCommerce orders are displayed within the timeline with timestamps for when they occurred.
On the right side is the Conversions log, which lists every tracked event. This can be useful if a session has 10+ views and you want to quickly find out what form they submitted or how much revenue an order was worth without scanning the entire timeline.
To the right of the timeline, there are icons indicating the country, device type, and browser used by the visitor. You can hover your cursor over any of them to reveal a tooltip with the country/device/browser name.
Above the icons, you may see a link that says “View all X sessions for this visitor.” If IA Pro recognizes other sessions for this visitor, you will be able to click on this link to see all of their recorded sessions on one page.
Here is an example of a visitor page accessed in this way:
This can be helpful to understand the actions a user took leading up to a conversion event. For instance, in the example above, you can see a visitor who first reached the site via a MailChimp email, and then purchased a product the following day.
It is not possible to look up sessions based on an individual user’s name, email, or other personal data. The data recorded by Independent Analytics Pro is fully anonymized and does not include personal data.
Using filters is essential
While it can be valuable (and fun) to visit this report each day and look through a few journeys, you’re unlikely to look at them all. In fact, you might look at fewer than 1 in every 1,000 sessions that get recorded.
This is why it’s so important to utilize the filters.
With filters, you can quickly find sessions that match certain criteria. For instance, you can find sessions with a specific landing page, more than 1 page view, or those from a particular country.
Here’s a look at all the available filters:
The Landing Page filter will find sessions with a matching landing page, whereas the Page filter will find sessions where the matching page was viewed at any point during the session.
The Conversion filters are especially useful and a bit more advanced than the other ones.
For example, if you select the Form Submissions filter, you can choose to display sessions with any form submission, or only include sessions with a submission for a specific form.
The Clicked Link filter works the same way, in that you can filter by any clicks or clicks that match a specific link pattern.
To find eCommerce orders, you can use the Gross sales filter, which works a bit differently from the other ones. With this filter, you can simply search for sessions with gross sales greater than zero, and that will eliminate any sessions without an order.
You have the flexibility to increase the value beyond zero if you only want to see sales with a certain value.
And like other reports, you can add multiple conditions. You could search for things like sessions with more than one view AND from Canada, or sessions with a form submission OR a click.
If you find a filter combination that’s valuable for your business, remember to save a new report, so you can revisit it easily in the future.
Lastly, the User Journeys report can display data from any date range, so you aren’t limited to only the most recent sessions. You can change the date using the date picker, just like any other report.
That’s everything you need to know to analyze your visitors and their behavior with the User Journeys report!
No, it’s not currently possible to display the analytics on the front-end. However, you can share back-end analytics access with non-admins and hide the WP admin interface.
Sharing back-end access
You can follow this tutorial to learn how to share access with other user roles on your site. You can also limit their access to stats for their own content only.
If you give the Subscriber role access, they will only be able to see a simplified Dashboard menu, the Profile menu, and the Analytics menu. You can also create a new custom user role with the User Role Editor plugin if you want.
Hiding the WP menu
If you want to hide the fact that they’re inside the WP admin, you can use the following code to hide the sidebar completely.
This code hides the WP admin sidebar if the user has the Subscriber user role.
Lastly, you can automatically redirect them to the Analytics menu when they login with this code snippet:
function redirect_subscribers_after_login($redirect_to, $request, $user) {
// Check if user is a valid WP_User object and has the 'subscriber' role
if (isset($user->roles) && is_array($user->roles) && in_array('subscriber', $user->roles)) {
return admin_url('profile.php'); // or use a custom URL here
}
return $redirect_to;
}
add_filter('login_redirect', 'redirect_subscribers_after_login', 10, 3);
Again, this will target anyone with the Subscriber user role who logs into the site. They’ll be automatically redirected to the Analytics menu, and with the sidebar hidden, they won’t see any other menus to navigate to.
You can add both snippets to your site using the free Code Snippets plugin.
If you have a dedicated account page on the front-end of your site for members, you can add an Analytics link and have it open in a new tab instead of redirecting members when they login.
Remember to replace <your_license_key_here> with your Independent Analytics Pro license key.
Now, if you visit the Analytics menu, you’ll see that the license key has been activated. This process saves the license key in the database, so you can delete both this code and the freemius-auto-activation plugin from the site once the key has been saved to the DB.
If you also want to ensure that your visits are ignored when you are logged out, you can ignore your own IP address.
If your ISP rotates your IP address every day, then that might not be the best solution. In this case, there is a setting to ignore yourself via a cookie. This option can be set for the entire administrator user role.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
Solo Reports allow you to view a full report for any table item in any report.
To open a Solo Report, hover over any row in the data table, and you’ll see a magnifying glass icon. Click on this button to open the Solo Report.
The Solo Report will open in a window above the current page, like this:
At the top, you’ll find the title and a label matching the report type, along with a button to close the report. You can also change the date range and download a PDF or CSV report.
The Quick Stats are identical to other reports, and include the same options to toggle their visibility. Likewise, the chart has the same settings for changing the visible stats and the interval.
Lower in the report, you’ll find a data table for each of the other report types.
In this example, we’re viewing a Solo Report for a page, so you can see tables for all the other report types. In the Referrers table, this lets you see where visitors of this page came from.
As another example, if you click on the Geographic tab, it will reveal the countries that visitors of this page visited from.
The Geographic map will also replace the chart above
Like in other reports, you can toggle the visible columns in the table and change the grouping, such as switching from Countries to Cities.
Solo Reports are available for table items in all reports, so this functionality isn’t restricted to just pages. For example, you could open a Solo Report for mobile devices and then check your campaign traffic from these visitors.
In conclusion, Solo Reports are perfect when you want to learn more about a particular page, referrer, location, device, campaign, or link. They allow you to see stats for this one item and segmented data from the other reports.
All organic traffic from Facebook will show up as the Facebook referrer with a Social referrer type. Traffic from visitors clicking on paid ads will be listed as Facebook Ads with an Ad referrer type.
This lets you easily compare how much traffic you get from your regular posts versus your paid ads. With Independent Analytics Pro, you can also compare form submissions and eCommerce sales from free vs. paid Facebook traffic.
Independent Analytics differentiates between these visitors by checking for the ?fbclid URL parameter that Facebook includes in ads.
How to see traffic from individual ads
If you’d like to see how much traffic you get from individual ads, this can be done with campaign URLs.
Independent Analytics Pro includes a dedicated campaign builder for creating these URLs and a Campaigns report where you can review stats for each ad.
How to Remove the mmdb File by Disabling Geotracking
When Independent Analytics is installed, it downloads a file called iawp-geo-db.mmdb into the wp-content/uploads folder. This file is needed to map IP addresses to their associated regions, enabling the Geographic report to function.
The iawp-geo-db.mmdb file is 113 MB. For most sites, this is not a major concern, but if you are managing sites with limited disk space available, it is possible to disable geotracking. This will delete the MMDB file from the site and prevent it from getting re-downloaded. The trade-off is that new data will not be recorded in the Geographic reports once geotracking is disabled.
You can add the following line of code to your wp-config.php file to disable geotracking:
define('IAWP_DISABLE_GEO_TRACKING', true);
Once this is added, the iawp-geo-db.mmdb file will be deleted immediately.
If you’re using multi-site, the MMDB file is only installed once on the parent site, so all child sites reference the single copy of the file there.
Independent Analytics does not have an integration with Looker Studio. However, you can export any report to CSV, and the CSV can then be imported into Looker Studio.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
When you purchase Independent Analytics Pro, you’re only required to enter your name and email at checkout. For this reason, your invoice will not include a company name or billing address. However, you can add this info to your account and download an updated invoice.
Next, click on the My Profile menu in the left sidebar. You can enter your billing info on this page.
Once your profile has been updated, visit the Orders History menu. You’ll see each of your purchases listed, and there will be a link on the right side to download an invoice. The new invoice will include all of the details entered into the My Profile page
