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You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
As an Independent Analytics Pro customer, you have access to the customer account dashboard here:
In the account portal, you can manage your license key, download new copies of Independent Analytics Pro, and manage your subscription.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
A click is recorded when a link matching one of the Link Patterns defined in the Click Tracking menu is clicked.
For example, let’s say you are tracking clicks on email links and PDF files only. When you display the Clicks metric in the Pages report table, it will show a count of how many times a link matching one of those two patterns was clicked on that page.
It’s also helpful to know that both left and right mouse button clicks are tracked. Visitors often right-click links to open them in a new tab or download the resource as a file, so it’s important to include these clicks too.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
Below you will find a description of each module and how to use it in your own Overview report.
The Top 10 List module will display a list of up to 10 results sorted by the selected metric.
This module is useful for finding your best- or worst-performing pages, referrers, geolocations, devices, and campaigns.
The Quick Stats module is just like the Quick Stats display at the top of your standard reports and displays aggregated metrics over the given date range.
You can choose any report you want here, so you could choose to display stats for a specific segment of your traffic, like search engine visitors only. Also, don’t forget you can display form and eCommerce metrics here too.
The line chart can show you the performance of any metric over time.
You can choose any report for this module, so you could show more granular data, like the bounce rate for your blog posts. You can display one or two different metrics in the chart.
The Pie Chart module is perfect for comparing top performers (or underperformers).
Since you can choose any report, you could also display your top traffic sources or countries in a pie chart. You can use any metric as well, so you could also display pages with the most clicks or cities with the lowest bounce rate.
The World Map module is just like the map found in the Geographic report. Countries are color coded based on their relative traffic, and you can hover over any country to see its views, visitors, and sessions.
You can display data from any of your Geographic reports instead of showing stats for all countries.
The Recent Views module is like a log displaying your site’s 40 most recent page views. Each view includes the timestamp and the visitor’s country, device, and browser, in addition to the page viewed.
This module doesn’t have any settings to configure. You can use the arrow buttons at the bottom to navigate between pages. It displays up to 20 views at a time if expanded to the wider width.
The Recent Conversions module is like a log that shows your site’s 40 most recent conversions. Each conversion also includes the timestamp and the visitor’s country, device type, and browser.
You can display eCommerce orders, form submissions, and/or clicks in this module. You can create multiple copies of this module if you’d like to dedicate each one to a specific conversion type.
The Busiest Time of Day module shows you which hours your site gets the most and least traffic.
The date range for this module is the sample size used to get the average. For example, you can see the hours your site was the busiest over the last 7, 30, or 90 days.
The Busiest Day of Week module shows you which days your site gets the most and least traffic.
The date range is the sample size you want to use when getting an average number of sessions per day. You can choose the starting day of the week in the Analytics > Settings menu.
The New vs. Returning Sessions module shows you how often visitors return to your website.
If someone arrives on your site for the first time, this is counted as a new session. If they have been to your site before, then it is counted as a returning session. This calculation makes it easy to see how much of your traffic is from returning visitors. You can read more about this metric here if you’d like.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
Other analytics apps use New vs. Returning Visitors, but Independent Analytics Pro uses a New vs. Returning Sessions metric instead.
If you’re unfamiliar with the sessions metric, you can find a definition of it here.
The New vs. Returning Sessions metric compares the number of first-time sessions to non-first-time sessions.
For example, let’s say someone visited your site for the first time today. That would be counted as a “new” session. Then, if they come back tomorrow, that would be a “returning” session. Each time they return to your site, it will be counted as a “returning” session for as long as this visitor is recognized.
So if you see that there are 4,000 new sessions and 6,000 returning sessions, then you know that 60% of the visits to your site are coming from people who have already been to your website.
This is a simple way to gauge how often people are coming back and what proportion of your traffic is from people who have already been to your website.
If you are interested in understanding why we chose to count sessions instead of visitors for this metric, you can find our logic explained here.
After studying the New vs. Returning Visitors metric, we found that it is not clear exactly when a visitor should be considered new vs returning.
For example, imagine you are looking at the last 30 days. New visitors should only include people who visited your site for the first time in the last 30 days. But what if someone visited your site 29 days ago, returned 7 times, and completed a purchase a week ago? Is that really a “new” visitor? It seems equally fair to call them a “returning” visitor since they have returned and become a customer. However, if you call every visitor who returns to your site a returning visitor, then someone who visited your site this morning and then again this afternoon would be a returning visitor even though they discovered your site today.
Part of the problem is that “new” and “returning” are not really opposites. There needs to be a clear definition of what makes a visitor “new,” and this should be based on the customer life cycle rather than being decided arbitrarily by the date range being viewed i.e. if you view the last 7 days, then visitors who first visited 8 days ago are now considered “returning” instead of “new.” While designing a better solution, we realized things were getting too complicated…
In the end, what everyone wants to know is relatively simple: Are people coming back to my website? Instead of creating a system to define “new” visitors, we decided to use “new sessions,” which are straightforward and easy to define. If someone arrives at your site for the first time, that’s a new session. If they’ve been to your site before, that’s a returning session.
We think our New vs. Returning Sessions metric provides a clear and easy-to-understand solution without any risk of misrepresenting the data.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
The Overview Report gives you one place to find data from all your saved reports.
It’s made with customizable modules that can display your data in a variety of ways, from pie charts and line graphs to top-ten lists.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to add your own modules, customize them, and reposition them in the report.
There are two ways to add a new module to the Overview report.
The first way is to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Add Module button in the placeholder module.
Alternatively, you can click the Add Module button in the toolbar, and this will scroll you to the bottom of the page and open the module picker.
Once you’ve clicked either button, you’ll see the module picker:
There are 10 different modules you can choose from, and you can find a summary of each module here.
Click on the module you’d like to add, and the module editor will appear. Each module has its own options that allow you to configure exactly what data you want to display.
Once you’re happy with your settings, you can click the Add Module button to include it in the report.
To edit one of your modules, hover over the header of the module, and three buttons will appear. Click on the cog icon to open the module settings.
You’ll see the same editor that was used when adding the module initially. You can modify the settings however you’d like and then click the Save button at the bottom to save your changes.
Let’s take a look at each of the settings available in the module editor. We’ll use a Top 10 List module as an example.
Every module includes the Name field, which you can use to provide a descriptive title for the module. For example, if you want to see your referrers with the lowest bounce rate, you might name it something like “Low Bounce Rate Referrers.”
Next, there is an option to choose one of your saved reports. For instance, if you choose the Pages report, you’ll see a list of your top 10 pages, or if you select Browsers, you’ll see your top browsers instead.
The Sort By option lets you select the metric to sort the results by. For example, if you want to see your pages with the longest View Duration, you would select that here.
The next option is called Sort Direction, and it allows you to sort the list from highest to lowest or lowest to highest. For instance, you could sort by lowest to highest if you wanted to find your pages with the shortest View Duration.
The last option is the Date Range, and this is an option that every module has. There are a few options to choose from, like Today, Yesterday, and Last 30 Days.
When editing a module, you’ll see a Change Module Type button at the top.
Clicking this button will replace the module editor with the module picker, so you can choose a new module to replace the current one.
This can be useful if, let’s say, you’ve created a Top 10 List of your referrers but then decide that a Pie Chart would be a better way to display this data.
Any module can be displayed in one or two columns.
If you hover over the header of a module, you will see three buttons. You can click on the layout icon to toggle a module between one and two columns wide.
The module width can be toggled in the normal display and also while reordering modules.
To reorder the modules, start by clicking the Reorder Modules button in the toolbar.
Once pressed, the button will turn purple, and the modules will display only their name and icon.
You can then drag and drop the modules into new positions.
Once you are finished, you can click the Reorder Modules button again to return to the regular display.
The Overview Report refreshes data in the modules once per hour. If you want to see the most recent data, you can click the Refresh button in the report header.
This will update all the modules right away to use data that is recent up to the present moment.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
It’s common to have a local development environment and/or a staging site in addition to your production website.
If your staging/dev environment uses one of the patterns below, you can activate your license key on it without it counting towards your total activations.
The following URLs are recognized as local development environments:
The following subdomains are recognized as staging sites:
The following TLDs are also recognized as belonging to staging sites:
If possible, try using one of the recognized patterns, as it makes license management much simpler.
If you are not able to use one of the above patterns, please refer to this guide for additional license management tips:
Managing License Activations Across Staging and Development Environments
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
The Independent Analytics for MainWP extension adds a new widget to the Overview menu where you can quickly toggle between stats for each of your websites.
The first step is to install the extension on your MainWP dashboard site. You can search for it by name (“Independent Analytics for MainWP”) in the Plugins > Add New menu or download it from the wordpress.org page here.
Once installed and activated, the next step is to visit the Overview menu and click the Sync Sites button in the toolbar.
Once this is done, refresh the page, and you will see the Independent Analytics widget.
If you visit a child site in the MainWP dashboard, you will see a nearly identical widget there as well:
The only difference is that it doesn’t include the dropdown to view stats for other websites.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
We plan on adding a popular posts widget in a future update, but for now, here are a few ways you can make one yourself.
Independent Analytics stores the number of views each page has in a meta field called iawp_total_views. This makes it possible to sort your posts by this field in order to get a list of posts sorted by popularity.
You can use this meta field with a plugin or in a solution you code yourself.
iawp_total_views as the field to sort by.There are two different approaches to programming the widget.
The developer API has a function called iawp_top_posts() that is made for getting popular posts. You can choose any post type and decide the exact date range to use. For instance, you could use this function to get the most popular posts from the past 30 days or from last month.
Here’s an example of how you can create a simple list of popular posts using this function:
$posts = iawp_top_posts([
'post_type' => 'posts',
'limit' => 10,
'from' => new DateTime('-30 days'),
'to' => new DateTime('now'),
'sort_by' => 'visitors'
]);
<div>
<ul>
<?php foreach($posts as $post) {
echo '<li>';
echo '<a href="'. get_permalink($post->id) .'">'. $post->title .'</a>';
echo ' ('. $post->views .' Views)';
echo '</li>';
} ?>
</ul>
</div> Note: The iawp_top_posts() function also accepts a category argument, which allows you to pass in the ID of a single category to fetch the posts from.
Since each page has its total view count stored in iawp_total_views, you can use it with WP_Query to get an ordered list of posts. For example, here’s an example of how to get a list of the 10 most popular posts and output the title of each one:
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'post',
'posts_per_page' => 10,
'meta_key' => 'iawp_total_views',
'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
'order' => 'DESC',
);
$query = new WP_Query($args);
if ($query->have_posts()) {
while ($query->have_posts()) {
$query->the_post();
echo '<h2>' . get_the_title() . '</h2>';
echo '<p>Views: ' . get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'iawp_total_views', true) . '</p>';
}
}
wp_reset_postdata();If you’re already familiar with using WP_Query and post meta fields, then this might be the best option for your site. The trade-off is that it doesn’t let you specify a date range, so you can only find the all-time most-viewed pages this way.
If you are developing your own plugin or child theme, then you can wrap either code snippet in your own function or shortcode to output wherever needed.
Otherwise, you can put the code snippet into a plugin like WPCode, which can also create a shortcode for you. Then, you can add the shortcode anywhere you want to see the list of popular posts.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
With Independent Analytics, we approach event tracking differently than other analytics platforms.
In most other analytics tools, you can use a line of JavaScript to trigger an event, giving it a name and a value. This is very flexible, but there are a couple of issues.
First, you have to know where to implement the JavaScript snippet, which can be complicated when trying to track form submissions or eCommerce sales and refunds. Secondly, the way this information can be presented in the Analytics menu is limited because there is no context.
For these reasons, we’ve implemented more user-friendly and context-aware goal-tracking features, including:
Instead of figuring out where to implement a JavaScript code snippet yourself, Independent Analytics Pro will automatically record all sales for you. The only requirement is that you use one of the supported eCommerce plugins, like WooCommerce, SureCart, or Easy Digital Downloads. There is no other configuration required.
Unlike simple goal tracking, which can only record one goal value, this integration tracks eight different eCommerce metrics, like gross sales, refunds, and conversion rate. This data can be found in the Quick Stats, chart, and data table of every report.
Learn more about eCommerce analytics.
Like the eCommerce tracking feature, Independent Analytics Pro integrates with other WordPress plugins to track form submissions automatically.
There are over 20+ supported plugins, including popular options like Contact Form 7, WPForms, and Fluent Forms. As long as your forms are built using one of these plugins, their submissions will be tracked automatically.
You can then find the submission and conversion rate of every form, plus an aggregated value for all forms.
This makes it simple to find out where your leads are coming from and which pages are converting visitors into leads most effectively.
Learn more about form tracking.
Independent Analytics Pro uses an innovative “link pattern” system for simple and codeless click-tracking.
From the Click Tracking menu, you can choose exactly which links should be tracked. In a few clicks, you can track all clicks on PDF files or email links on your website. You can also track clicks to external domains and subdirectories or track individual links with classes.
You can then see how many clicks your tracked links are getting in the Clicks report.
Learn more about click tracking.
As you can see, the way event tracking is implemented in Independent Analytics Pro is much simpler and more robust than the JavaScript snippet approach of many other analytics tools.
If there is any goal that you need to track that isn’t included here, feel free to contact support, and we can help you with a solution.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
This tutorial will help you if you get the following error message when uploading Independent Analytics via the Plugins > Add New menu:
The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini.
This can happen if the plugin’s zip file is greater than the allowed upload filesize. As of now, Independent Analytics is 8.2MB, but that value is subject to change in the future. For this reason, it would be best to increase your max upload size to at least 10MB.
There are a few easy ways to accomplish this.
You can simply message your host and ask them to increase your site’s upload_max_filesize, and they should be able to handle this quickly for you.
If your web host uses cPanel, there is a built-in PHP.ini file editor. Open it, look for the upload_max_filesize option, and change it to at least 10M.
Please note that the value should be 10M and not 10MB.
The free MaxUploader plugin can show you your site’s current upload limits, and it includes simple options for increasing these limits from the WP admin dashboard.
If, for some reason, you are unable to increase your site’s max upload size, you can upload the plugin via FTP instead. Your hosting account likely includes a file manager, but if not, you can use a standalone FTP client like FileZilla.
In order to upload Independent Analytics to your website, unzip it first so that you have the independent-analytics folder. Then, on your server, navigate to the wp-content/plugins/ folder and upload the independent-analytics folder there.
You will then see Independent Analytics in your Plugins menu, where you can activate it to begin use.
You can submit a feature request through our feedback board, or contact us directly via our contact page.
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