Hi everyone, this is Felix from Vanfittery!

We design and manufacture modular camping solutions that turn everyday vans into campervans within minutes. We are currently in the middle of a major expansion phase, extending our reach from Germany to the wider EU market. Our shop is now live in 9 languages, and we are adding more regions step by step.

While expanding is exciting, it brings a massive challenge: Data blindness.

When you run a local shop, you often have a “gut feeling” about what works. But once you scale to multiple countries and start working with various influencers, “gut feeling” isn’t enough. You need hard data.

This case study explores how replacing our complex analytics stack with Independent Analytics (PRO) helped us track marketing ROI and understand our new international customers without violating strict GDPR privacy laws.

The Challenge: GDPR-friendly data tracking

Before using Independent Analytics, we faced a common dilemma for European shop owners: We needed detailed data to optimize our marketing, but tools like Google Analytics 4 were becoming increasingly complex to set up legally (due to GDPR) and difficult to read.

We often found ourselves asking simple questions that took hours to answer:

• “Did that expensive YouTube collaboration actually sell any products, or did it just bring traffic?”
• “Are our new French visitors actually understanding the checkout, or are they dropping off?”

We needed a solution that was integrated directly into WordPress, privacy-friendly by design, and offered real-time insights without a degree in data science.

Independent Analytics was a perfect solution for us.

In Germany and across Europe, strict GDPR laws require a cookie banner. With traditional tools like GA4, if a user clicks “Decline,” they simply vanish from your statistics. For most shops, this means flying blind on 40% to 60% of their actual traffic. Since Independent Analytics is privacy-friendly by design and doesn’t use tracking cookies, we can legally track all visits without needing a “Yes” from the cookie banner.

For the first time, our dashboard actually matches our reality. We are no longer guessing based on incomplete data.

Actionable insights directly in the dashboard

We started using Independent Analytics in 2024 and upgraded to the PRO version later to handle our scaling phase. Here is how we utilized the features to solve our specific pains:

1. Solving the ROI mystery with campaign tracking

Marketing is our biggest lever for growth, especially working with creators in the “Vanlife” scene. Previously, attributing sales to a specific influencer was messy.

Using the Campaign Builder, we now generate unique tracking links for every partner. For example, when we launch a campaign, we can see exactly how many visitors an influencer sent, and more importantly, the conversion rate of that specific traffic. We moved from “hoping it works” to knowing exactly which partner delivers a positive ROI.

2. Optimizing the flow with user journeys

Our products are designed as modular systems, where certain items work best together to create a complete “room concept.” A prime example is the combination of our Rear Slide-out sleeping system and the matching Storage Space Plus. A major win for us was using the User Journeys feature to understand how customers navigate these dependencies.

The reports revealed a discrepancy: We saw high session durations (up to 50 minutes), but often combined with a very low time-on-page (around 10 seconds) within the active flow. Looking at the user journey in Independent Analytics, the cause became clear: “Tab-Hopping.”

Users were jumping back and forth between the sleeping system and the storage module. We interpreted this as a sign of uncertainty. Customers were likely trying to cross-reference dimensions or visualize the combination, but the layout forced them to switch pages constantly.

We saw a similar “ping-pong” pattern between product pages and our FAQ section, suggesting that critical information was hidden in the FAQs rather than being visible right where the purchase decision happens.

While analytics can’t read minds, these patterns gave us a strong hypothesis to act on. Based on these journey insights, we started optimizing the individual product pages to include clearer compatibility info and direct links to matching modules. By reducing the need for manual comparison, we keep users focused on building their setup.

In the future, we plan to use these insights to focus more on explaining the different room concepts by using more images or 3D models to visualize the possible combinations upfront.

3. Social media tracking and WooCommerce integration

For a brand built on visual inspiration, social media is our front door. However, “Likes” don’t pay the bills; sales do. One of the most powerful aspects of Independent Analytics is how it seamlessly bridges the gap between social engagement and our WooCommerce revenue.

In the past, we could see traffic coming from social platforms, but we had no easy way to compare the different channels based on data. Thanks to the eCommerce Analytics and the Referrers Report, we can now see the direct financial impact of each channel.

For instance, our data shows that YouTube drives the highest volume of long-duration sessions, while a platform like Facebook has a significantly higher bounce rate, indicating less interest or interaction and therefore less business value.

We no longer guess where to put our energy. Because the WooCommerce integration works out of the box, we can see exactly how our social channels are performing. If we see a spike in sales for a specific module, we can trace it back to the social source and double down on that content strategy.

Implementation and results: Zero setup, instant data

One of the main reasons we stuck with Independent Analytics was the “plug and play” nature. We needed a system that works, without the setup hassle every time you try out a new marketing strategy.

• Instant Setup, No Code: Unlike traditional tools that require complex header scripts or external cookies, this was a true “install and go” experience.
• 100% Data Ownership & GDPR Compliance: Since the data is stored on our own server and doesn’t pass personal data to third-party tech giants, we no longer worry about data privacy compliance regarding third-party trackers, cookie banners, or consent management.
• Faster Decision Making: We reduced the time spent specifically on analyzing traffic sources or fiddling with analytics tools. The saved time is now used for making instead of measuring.
• WooCommerce Integration: The native integration meant we didn’t have to configure “Goals” manually. Revenue tracking just worked out of the box.

Conclusion

Data we can rely on is the foundation for our decision-making. Tools like GA4 failed to provide a clear picture due to strict GDPR laws and cookie opt-outs.

For us, Independent Analytics isn’t just user tracking; it’s a strategic tool. It bridges the gap between technical data and business decisions. As our shop continues to grow, having a robust, privacy-first analytics tool directly inside our shop backend is non-negotiable.

If you are running a WooCommerce store and want to know who buys your products and why, without the headache of external enterprise tools, Independent Analytics is the way to go!

We’d like to thank Felix again for sharing this awesome case study! If you want to try Independent Analytics out on your site, you can click here to download it for free. If you have any questions for us, feel free to reach out via our contact form.

We’ve put together a detailed comparison to help you decide.

In this comparison, we’ll go feature-by-feature, comparing how IA works vs. GA4. By the end, you should have a clear idea of which one is best for your site.

Now, let’s get on with the comparison!

Feature Comparison

This isn’t a comprehensive list of features offered by either tool, but rather, a condensed list of the most important features to consider when comparing Independent Analytics vs. Google Analytics (GA4).

Independent Analytics is vastly easier to use

This is, perhaps, the biggest difference between the Independent Analytics plugin and Google Analytics.

Independent Analytics (IA) is easy to use, and GA4 is extremely complicated. You will see some mind-boggling examples throughout this article, but if you want an analytics tool that is easy to use and understand, Independent Analytics is going to be a better choice for your website.

See your analytics inside the WP admin

GA4 has its own dashboard that you can log in to and share access with other collaborators. Maybe that is your preferred option, but for many WP users, it’s an advantage that they can find stats from IA right inside their admin dashboard.

In addition to the main Analytics menu, you can also see an overview of your stats in the dashboard widget when you log in. You can also see how many views each post has in the Posts menu, and there is a view count in the admin bar when looking at any page on your website.

These integrations with WP make it easy to find stats while you are using your site, which can be very convenient.

As for sharing access, you can give analytics access to any user role from the Settings menu. This makes it simple to share the analytics with shop managers and editors on the site.

“Google Analytics is too complicated and time consuming. This app does what it promises to do. Simple, intuitive and works on mobile too. Thanks!”

– Dotch, wordpress.org

Privacy-friendly

After the introduction of the GDPR, it became necessary for many European WP users to find a new analytics solution, with the risk of being penalized for using Google Analytics. In fact, it is illegal to use in some countries, including France, Austria, and Italy.

With IA, you don’t have to worry about any corporations spying on you and your visitors. IA does not use any cookies, store personally identifiable information, or communicate with external servers. It creates and stores data entirely on your server, so you’re the only one with access.

For these reasons, it is not required that you display a cookie consent form before tracking visitors with Independent Analytics. With GA4, you can miss out on stats for 30% or even more of your visitors because they don’t agree to using cookies. These are all visitors that IA is able to track for you.

“Finally a great and useful alternative to do some serious tracking! (without the speed problems and all the other headaches coming with external services which you have to pay every month)”

– Svenni, wordpress.org

Popular pages and traffic sources

The info that most website owners want to see first is a list of their top pages and top traffic sources. This is easy to find in IA in the Pages and Referrers reports.

This data is, of course, available in GA4 as well. The top pages are listed when you first log in, and you can find the referrers in the Traffic Acquisition menu. It groups the traffic by the type of referrer by default, so you just need to customize the first column to show the name of each site instead.

Geographic data

Geographic data is another feature available in both IA and GA4. In Independent Analytics, there is a dedicated Geographic report with a world map showing where your traffic is concentrated.

The data table below shows traffic from each individual country and/or city.

The visitor’s geolocation is approximated based on their IP address, and this means that city locations are not always accurate. GA4 uses a mix of technologies to find their geolocation, and it is more accurate than IA when gauging the city a visitor is in.

Device tracking

In Independent Analytics, there is a Device report that will show you a breakdown of traffic from each device type.

You can also modify the table to display traffic by browser or operating system as well.

This same data is available in GA4, plus a few additional options like screen resolutions and individual device models.

“This is what I really need. I can now see my website performance in a very clean, clear, correct and continuous manner. It’s superb.”

– Epaper, wordpress.org

Save custom reports

In Independent Analytics, you can customize various elements of the report, such as the visible stats, the date range, filters, and more.

If you want to revisit a report in the future, it only takes a couple of clicks to save it as a new report. You can then find it readily accessible from the sidebar.

GA4 also allows you to greatly customize your reports and then save them to revisit in the future. It also has an option to create a summary card of the report for display on an overview page.

Export any report

Another feature that both IA and GA4 include is the option to export any report to PDF or CSV.

With IA, this is as easy as clicking a button in the toolbar and choosing which format you want:

The CSV report includes all of the data included in the data table, and the PDF is a visual replica of the current report.

UTM Campaign tracking

In GA4, you can visit the Traffic acquisition report, switch the first column to display the source/medium, and then show another column with the campaign name.

This works well enough but is confusing because the source and medium are included in a single column and can be overwritten by UTM data if found.

In IA Pro, this data is more straightforward in the Campaigns report. It simply lists each unique campaign, including a column for each of the five UTM parameters.

Using the filtering system, you can easily narrow down the results to see traffic for one particular campaign, source, or medium.

“This plugin covers all of the data that I need to make informed decisions. Since it resides on the server, the accuracy is 100%. Great support as well!”

-Ted Goeltz, NationalSafetyGear.com

Real-time analytics

Independent Analytics Pro includes a basic real-time analytics report that shows you how many people are on the site, how many different pages they’ve looked at, which referrers they came from, and more.

It’s great for getting a quick overview of your site’s current traffic and can be especially useful for investigating any traffic spikes as they happen.

A major difference in the real-time report provided by GA4 is that it includes a world map showing where all of your visitors are currently coming from. There is also a segmentation tool that lets you see the results for visitors from specific countries or cities and other criteria.

Click tracking

Click tracking in Independent Analytics Pro is both simple and scalable. From the Click Tracking menu, you can configure link patterns to choose which links to track on your website.

For example, you can track all clicks pointing to a specific domain or using a certain protocol (like email links or phone number links). You can also define custom classes to track, which you can then add to any button or link on the website.

It’s designed to work effortlessly when adding classes to elements created with Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, or any other page builder you enjoy using.

Once you’ve chosen which links you want to track, you’ll see all of your clicks show up in the Clicks report.

The table lists all of your clicks, including the link pattern and the target URL of the clicked link. Using the filters, you can easily narrow down the results to individual URLs or link patterns.

In GA4, you can track many different types of events, including clicks. It’s really versatile but very cumbersome to implement and create reports. Here is an 18min tutorial if you want to learn how it works:

eCommerce tracking

IA Pro has an eCommerce integration with WooCommerce and SureCart that tracks your sales automatically. You’ll see orders, refunds, conversion rates, and five other metrics show up in the Analytics menu without spending a second on configuration.

It makes it easy to see how many sales you’ve generated from each traffic source, landing page, country, and more.

With GA4, you have to run a custom Javascript code snippet on the PHP hook fired by your eCommerce plugin when a sale is completed and another when a refund is processed. You’ll need to hire a developer to do this for you or purchase another WP plugin just for this one feature.

“I bought the pro version for an e-commerce site. It‘s a perfect match, works well and does anything we need. Keep up the good work!”

– Rob Scharrenberg, AllYouNeat.com

Form tracking

Form Tracking is available in IA Pro and works automatically with 18 different form plugins, such as WPForms, Contact Form 7, and Gravity Forms. As long as your forms are created with one of those plugins, the submissions will be tracked automatically.

The form submission data can be found in the Quick Stats, the chart, and the data table. For instance, here’s an example showing form submissions and conversion rates for a site’s top referrers:

GA4 can track form submissions too, but it’s… complicated. Here is a flow chart someone created to explain which form tracking technology you should use in GA4.

Sounds fun, right?

You could read that flowchart and try to begin to understand it, or you could install IA Pro and have form tracking implemented instantly for you.

Email reports

Lastly, the Independent Analytics Pro plugin adds a simple email report feature that can auto-deliver reports every day, week, or month. The email report includes an overview of your stats from the previous period, and you can customize the colors to match your brand.

This is another feature where GA4 offers more advanced functionality, allowing you to schedule up to 50 different emails. The email attaches a PDF generated from whichever report you decide to send.

“This is significantly better and easier to understand than the top dog Google. I was so impressed with Independent Analytics that I bought a lifetime license.”

– Peter Bernau, DarkWolfCave.de

How to choose between Independent Analytics and Google Analytics

As you’ve seen, there is a major theme in this comparison: Google Analytics can do more, but Independent Analytics is much, much easier to use.

In many cases, there are features in IA that work automatically and can be understood almost immediately, whereas the same feature in GA4 will require watching numerous tutorials or even hiring a developer for help.

Furthermore, you should ask yourself if you need the additional functionality provided by GA4 or if the features in IA are advanced enough for your needs.

And lastly, it’s important to understand the privacy implications of using GA4. It comes with the added requirement that you display a cookie consent form, which means a large number of visitors will go completely untracked because they do not agree to sharing personal data.

If you want to give Independent Analytics a try on your WordPress website, it’s entirely free to use! You can install it on as many sites as you want and record an unlimited number of visits.

Click here to download

If you’re interested in Independent Analytics Pro for its advanced functionality, you can check out the pricing page here:

Click here to view pricing

Thanks for reading this comparison of Independent Analytics vs. Google Analytics (GA4). We hope it makes your decision easy, but if you have any uncertainty, please reach out to us via our contact page or the button at the bottom right of the screen.

Whether you’re collecting leads, quote requests, or other prospects, forms are a critical element of most websites.

And yet, can you say for certain where your submissions are coming from?

Are you getting more leads from Google or Facebook?

What about the countries your leads are coming from? Are they using your site on mobile or desktop?

And which pages are your forms getting submitted on?

These are all questions you can answer easily by using Fluent Forms with Independent Analytics Pro.

In this post, you’ll learn how to use this powerful combination of plugins to get detailed analytics for all of your form submissions.

Here’s how it works…

Add your forms with Fluent Forms

The Fluent Forms plugin boasts an impressive 4.8 rating with over 500K active websites using it right now.

If you’re not using Fluent Forms already, it offers a fantastic drag-and-drop editor for building custom forms. We find it to be more intuitive and better designed than the majority of competing form plugins.

Here’s what the form builder looks like:

You can see a simple contact form is previewed on the left side, and the available fields are listed on the right.

While you can create an entirely custom form, they have a library with dozens of pre-made forms too. A few examples include:

• Market research survey
• Donation form
• Volunteer signup form
• Quote request form

You can pick one of these forms to get started with and then customize how you see fit.

Once your form is ready to go, you can start tracking your submissions.

Where to Find Your Form Stats

Fluent Forms includes some basic stats on its own. If you view the Entries menu, you can see your form submissions from each day, broken down by form.

And if you click on a single form, you can see submission stats for that individual form, plus additional info like the browser and devices used by your contacts.

These stats give you a great start, but if you want to learn even more about your leads, that’s where Independent Analytics Pro comes in.

Advanced form tracking with Independent Analytics Pro

Independent Analytics is an analytics plugin built exclusively for WordPress. You can use it to monitor your traffic and create a dashboard of custom reports. Plus, it’s entirely free to use.

It offers superior privacy compared to legacy analytics platforms because it does not use cookies, share information with external servers, or store personally identifiable information.

Basically, we think it’s the best statistics plugin around

But how does this help you track your Fluent Form submissions? Well, that’s where the Pro version comes in.

Independent Analytics Pro includes form submission tracking that records all of your Fluent Forms submissions. Even better, there’s no configuration required; it works automatically from the moment it’s installed.

With IA Pro and Fluent Forms on your site, you’ll be able to find the number of submissions from each traffic source in the Referrers report, like this:

Not only can you compare submission totals, but you can also compare the conversion rates. For example, you may get more submissions from Google than Reddit but find that visitors from Reddit convert at a much higher rate. That would be a strong indicator you should spend more time marketing on Reddit.

In addition to viewing the submissions and conversion rates of all of your forms combined, you can also view these stats for each individual form:

This data isn’t restricted to the Referrers report either. You can also see the submission totals and conversion rates of each form in your Pages, Geographic, Devices, and Campaigns reports.

Imagine you have a form that displays in the sidebar on every page of your site. You might want to know which pages, in particular, are driving the most submissions of that form. This is easily done in the Pages report by sorting the pages by submissions for that form.

Lastly, you can view stats for each form over time in the chart, but instead of only viewing form stats, you can also view them alongside other metrics. For example, here are the submissions for a lead generation form plotted alongside the “views” metric.

You can also display the bounce rate, views per page, average session duration, and more in the chart.

How to use the integration

The best part about the Fluent Forms + Independent Analytics Pro integration is that it works automatically!

As long as you have both plugins installed on your site, your forms will be tracked and their stats will show up in both Fluent Forms and the Independent Analytics reports.

Start tracking today

As you’ve seen, Fluent Forms and Independent Analytics Pro are a powerful combination for collecting leads and optimizing your marketing campaigns.

Together, they can help you evolve your website into a highly profitable and effective platform for growing your business.

If you want to learn more about Fluent Forms, check out their website here.

And, if you’d like more info and screenshots of the form tracking feature in Independent Analytics Pro, then you can click here to see more.

Thanks for reading!

It’s a common question for any WordPress site owner to ask.

You likely have a preferred browser you use every day, so you may not know what your site looks like in other browsers. It should be the same, but that’s not always the case.

Checking your site in a dozen different browsers is awfully tedious, so instead, you can simply check your engagement metrics to see if any browser is performing worse than the others.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• How to track your traffic by browser
• How to compare performance between browsers
• Additional ways to use this data

Keep reading to find our recommendation to track browser data.

Start tracking browser data

The first thing you need to do is track the browser data of your visitors.

While there are complex analytics suites available like GA4, we’d like to propose a much simpler alternative.

If you’re using WordPress for your website, then you should try our free plugin, Independent Analytics.

It’s way simpler than platforms like Google Analytics (GA4). You don’t need to include a tracking script yourself or touch any code; everything works automatically from the moment you install the plugin.

Additionally, the interface is very easy to use and shows up right inside the WP admin dashboard. There’s no need to login to a separate site or create a new account anywhere to use it.

You’ll find familiar stats like the number of visitors, bounce rate, and views per session. Of course, you’re here to figure out where to find your traffic by browser, so let’s talk about that next.

Where to find traffic by browser

To find your traffic by browser, start by visiting the Devices report.

Once there, click on the Group by Device Type button, switch the grouping to Browser, and click the Apply button.

This is going to update the data table to show data for your browsers instead of the device types used to visit your site.

You’ll see every browser with its metrics listed in the table below like this:

As you can see, each browser includes the number of visitors, and next to that number is the percentage of total visitors it’s responsible for. For instance, the screenshot above shows that 53.45% of visitors used Chrome.

There are lots of other metrics you can enable, such as the bounce rate and visitor growth. These can be toggled via the Edit Columns button in the toolbar.

With these additional metrics enabled, you can conduct a more comprehensive analysis of each browser’s traffic.

Now that you know how to find the browsers your visitors are using and additional performance metrics for each one, let’s discuss how you can best use this data.

How to use browser traffic data

While it’s neat to see your traffic from each browser, there are actionable ways to use this data to grow your business.

Fix design issues

The first thing you’ll want to do is to check for any browsers with poor performance. In particular, you’ll want to check the bounce rate, views per session, and session duration metrics.

All metrics should be fairly similar across the browsers, so look for any that really stand out. For instance, if most of your browsers have a 70% bounce rate, but one has a 95% bounce rate, that’s a good indication that something is wrong.

If you find a browser with poor engagement, try visiting your site with the same browser on both mobile and desktop. There’s a good chance you’ll find something broken on the site that’s affecting visitor behavior.

Drop browser support

If you’re familiar with web development, then you know how tricky cross-browser support has been over the years.

This isn’t as much of a problem these days, but it’s worth checking your browser data to see if you have any visitors still using outdated browsers like Internet Explorer.

If you find an extremely small percentage of users with old browsers, then you may be able to drop support for those browsers altogether. This could allow you to add more modern features and layouts to your site that were previously impossible due to the restrictions of older browsers.

If you have a web developer on your team, make sure to share this data with them.

Start collecting browser data

Finding the browsers your visitors use is easy when you have the right tools.

And once you know which browsers are being used, you can check user engagement for each one. If you find any browser with lagging metrics, try it out yourself to check for obvious bugs and glitches on your site.

If you don’t have a way to track browser traffic yet, you can get started today with our free plugin:

We hope it helps you greatly in optimizing your site!

Thanks for reading this guide on finding your web traffic by browser. You can post in the comments section below if you have any questions or feedback.

Or maybe you don’t.

It’s hard to understand if your pages per session metric is good without anything to compare it to.

Is 1.10 a good value? Or should it be 4.25?

In this post, you’re going to learn:

• What a good pages per session metric looks like
• How to track pages per session
• How to optimize your pages per session metric

I know you’re excited, so let’s dive in with some benchmarks.

Pages per session benchmarks

It’s important to keep in mind that a “good” pages per session value changes wildly based on the type of website.

With that said, here are some general guidelines you can use:

• Blog: 1.4
• Business: 1.7
• eCommerce: 4.0

Blogs have difficulty achieving a high pages per session metric because the majority of their traffic is usually from SEO. The common visitor behavior is to find the answer they’re looking for and leave without exploring further.

General business websites tend to have a higher pages per session value because visitors are more likely to be researching the product/service offered, requiring visits to multiple pages.

eCommerce sites have a very high pages per session metric because they’re designed for browsing. It’s not uncommon for someone to visit a category page and open up ten tabs on an eCommerce store, whereas this is hard to imagine happening on a blog or general business website.

Regardless of which type of site you’re running, you’ll need a reliable way to track this metric before you can analyze and improve it.

You might want to explore benchmarks for average session duration next.

How to track pages per session

If you’re not sure how to track pages per session, there are some great free tools available.

For WordPress users, check out our plugin, Independent Analytics.

It’s privacy-friendly, installs in seconds, and is much easier to use than more complex analytics tools like GA4.

You can find the full analytics suite inside your WP dashboard, making it easy to check your site’s performance each time you login.

Now, of course, you’re probably wondering about that pages per session metric.

In Independent Analytics, we call this metric views per session, and you can find it in the Quick Stats at the top of the page.

We’ll be using “views per session” and “pages per session” interchangeably throughout the rest of this article.

So far, we’ve only discussed the views per session metric in the context of your entire site. While you can easily find this metric as shown above, you can find it for individual traffic sources too.

For example, if you visit the Referrers menu, you can enable the Views Per Session column and compare engagement across all your traffic sources.

This is extremely useful because you can find out which sites are delivering the highest quality traffic. You may find a source sending loads of visitors that barely engage with your site but another source sending fewer, more highly engaged visitors.

Since you already know your global views per session, you can easily tell which referrers are sending higher vs. lower-than-average quality visitors.

Now that you know how to thoroughly analyze your views per session, let’s talk about how to optimize it so you can reach and exceed the benchmarks.

You can repeat this same analysis for every country, device type, and browser too.

How to optimize pages per session

Like all metrics, there are systematic steps you can take to improve your site’s pages per session.

Here are a few simple ideas to get you started:

Shift your traffic focus

One of the easiest ways to increase your views page session is to change the balance of traffic you’re getting.

Find the referrers sending visitors with the most page views per session and double down on getting more traffic from them.

Additionally, find the traffic sources that are sending low-engagement visitors and minimize the visitors you get from these sites.

Optimize for more devices

Check the Devices report and compare views per session by device type. If people are browsing your site a lot more on mobile vs. desktop traffic, then you may need to review the design and find ways you can improve it so that engagement on mobile and desktop both match.

Funnel traffic to high-engagement pages

One last smart way to get people to view more pages on your site is to promote the pages that get the most engagement.

In the Pages report, you can enable and sort by the Exit Rate column to find where visitors are leaving your site.

The Exit Rate shows you how likely someone is to leave a page when they view it. In other words, the pages with the lowest Exit Rate are pages where your visitors are most likely to click on another page instead of leaving.

Following this logic, if you use internal links in your content, sidebar, and slide-ins to promote low Exit Rate pages, more visitors will reach those pages and continue to browse, thus increasing your pages per session metric.

We have benchmarks for what a good exit rate is too.

Start optimizing today

Now you know what a good pages per session metric looks like for your website, how to track this metric, and how to optimize for it.

If you liked what you saw of Independent Analytics here, you can download a copy for free to get started:

Thanks for reading this guide on what a good pages per session value is, and please post any comments or questions you have below before leaving.

Viewing the stats for your categories will help you understand where visitors are browsing and which topics they’re most interested in.

With the right tools, this data is easy to come by.

In this tutorial, you’ll discover:

• A free plugin to track visits to your categories
• How to see the number of visitors each category gets
• How to check the stats for posts in a specific category

By the time you’re done, you’ll have all the inspiration you need to draft and publish your next 100 articles!

Let’s begin with how you can track category data on your site.

How to track visits to your category pages

The first step is to start tracking visitors to your site. While you may have a tool like Google Analytics installed, it requires additional code and configuration to report on category traffic and stats for posts in a category.

That’s one of the reasons we developed Independent Analytics, a free WordPress analytics plugin that requires zero coding or configuration.

It installs just like any other plugin and starts recording data right away. The interface is clean and simple, and it shows up right inside the regular WordPress admin.

Now that you know how to get this data for your site, let’s talk about where to find stats for your post categories.

How to view stats for category archives

The Pages report lists every page on your site that’s received a visit. While you can find traffic for your categories there, you can add a filter to clean up the report and see data only for your categories.

Start by clicking the Filter Pages button in the toolbar.

Next, select Page Type as the column and choose Category as the type of page you want to see stats for.

Once applied, the dashboard will update so that you only see stats for your categories. This allows you to see stats for each of your individual categories in the data table.

In this example, you can see that each of the three categories gets fairly similar traffic, but visitors browse the Gear Recommendations category the most.

Finding stats like this for your categories can help you understand which topics are most interesting to visitors, but let’s not stop here. Another way to uncover your most popular topics is to check the traffic of posts based on their category.

How to view stats for posts in a specific category

Using the filtering system again, you can select the Post Category column and choose any of your categories to analyze individually.

Rather than looking at stats for your category pages, this is going to show you stats for posts that are in the selected category.

This example reveals some really interesting data. While the Gear Recommendations category page itself got more views than the other category pages, the posts in this category received only 575 out of the 21,112 views the site got.

You can repeat this analysis for each of your categories to find which one gets the most visitors. In order to make a fair comparison, you might want to get the average number of views per post so that one category doesn’t appear more successful just because it has more posts.

You may find that a category you don’t often use gets a ton of visitors per post, and that could be the best topic to explore further on your site.

You can also use the Quick Stats at the top of the page to find out which category has the lowest bounce rate and highest average session duration.

Find your WP category stats today

While WordPress doesn’t include stats on its own, there are plenty of free tools available, like Independent Analytics.

If you want to give it a try, you can download it for free here:

You’ll be able to analyze your category traffic so you can find out which ones are most popular and what you should be writing about next.

Thanks for reading this tutorial on finding WordPress stats by category. If you have any comments or questions, you can post them below.

Or maybe you want to look at yesterday’s traffic by hour so you can find the performance of a timed email or social media campaign.

Or better yet, maybe you just need to find your peak hours so you know when you should take your site offline for routine maintenance.

There are numerous ways hourly traffic data can help you better understand your site and improve its performance.

And this data can also be easy to find! Here’s how…

Where to find website traffic by hour

If you’re using Google Analytics, there are a few different ways to get hourly data. You can adjust the chart view or follow the steps here to create a custom table report that includes hourly traffic data.

If you want a simpler solution, consider a GDPR-friendly Google Analytics alternative, like Independent Analytics.

It’s a free plugin we developed that installs in seconds, records all your traffic, and presents your data in a simple and easy-to-understand format.

It adds a complete analytics dashboard in the WordPress admin, where you can find stats like your visitors, bounce rate, session duration, and more.

The chart displays your traffic per day by default, but it’s easy to switch it to an hourly view.

First, you likely don’t want to view hourly traffic for the last 30 days, so start by selecting a shorter date range.

The date picker has convenient buttons you can click to easily select today or yesterday for analysis.

If you choose a single day in the date picker, the chart will automatically adjust to show hourly data instead of daily data.

As you can see, hovering your cursor over any data point reveals the precise number of views and visitors over that hour.

Unlike GA, the data in Independent Analytics updates in real-time, so you can check your traffic throughout the day to monitor the impact of social and email promotions you might have running.

If you choose a longer date range and you don’t see hourly data right away, you can use the interval select to manually switch to hourly data points.

Viewing your traffic by month and week is just as easy. Just select a longer date range and change the interval if it doesn’t already update on its own.

How to find your peak traffic hours

Checking your hourly traffic makes it easier to see the impact of timed marketing promotions. However, it’s also great for evaluating the natural ebb and flow of traffic to your website.

If you need to take your site down for maintenance, you might want to find your peak hours so you can avoid them during your updates.

Take a look at his example chart of hourly traffic:

As you can see, the traffic for this example website is fairly consistent throughout the day, even late into the evening.

However, there is a clear drop-off between 2am-8am, so that would be the best time to do any maintenance that might disrupt normal visitors.

How to monitor traffic in real-time

As mentioned earlier, Independent Analytics tracks in real-time, so you can see your visitors for today whenever you visit the analytics.

If you want to take things to the next level with a dedicated real-time analytics dashboard, that’s available in the Independent Analytics Pro version.

Independent Analytics Pro includes a real-time analytics dashboard that updates every ten seconds and displays the number of visitors currently on your website.

You can leave this dashboard open to monitor spikes in traffic as marketing promotions go live or to keep an eye on your traffic while your site is in maintenance mode.

The “Active Visitors” count works the same way that Google’s Universal Analytics used to; it includes anyone who has been active on your site within the past five minutes.

You can also see the pages currently being viewed, the referrers that sent you Active Visitors, the countries they came from, and there is now also a list of device types being used (more on device data here).

If you want down-to-the-second monitoring of your website, real-time analytics can be an excellent supplement to the hourly traffic data found in the other dashboards.

Start tracking your hourly traffic

Most analytics tools have a way to view hourly traffic, but if your current analytics tool of choice doesn’t include this data or makes it difficult to access, consider switching to a simpler solution.

You can find cookieless analytics solutions here to choose from, and if you’re using WordPress, check out our plugin:

Learn more about Independent Analytics

Thanks for reading this guide on hourly website traffic, and feel free to post any comments you have below.

It’s the fundamental question answered by analytics.

And in the world of web analytics, there are loads of metrics available for analyzing the performance of your site.

One such metric is exit rate, a metric which is often misunderstood, leading to questions like, “What is a good exit rate for a website?”

The truth is, that question is nonsensical, and here’s why…

Your site doesn’t have an exit rate

Exit rate measures how often a page is the last page in a session whenever it’s viewed. It can only be used to understand the performance of individual pages.

If you’re looking for a site-wide metric, you’re probably more interested in bounce rate.

The exit rate of your website, and every other website for that matter, is 100% because every visitor eventually exits.

Exit rate vs bounce rate

Unlike exit rate, which is a page metric, bounce rate is much more versatile and can be measured for your site as a whole.

Bounce rate measures the percentage of single-page sessions. It tells you how often someone visits your site and leaves after viewing just one page. A bounce rate of 50% means that half of your visitors only looked at one page before leaving.

On the other hand, the exit rate tells you how likely someone is to leave your site when they view a certain page.

We have a much more detailed comparison between these metrics here:

Exit Rate vs. Bounce Rate: The Simple Explanation

Now that you’ve learned a bit about how these two metrics work, let’s get into some benchmarks for both exit rate and bounce rate.

What’s a good bounce rate?

A good bounce rate is highly dependent on the type of site.

With that said, here are some benchmarks you can use to check if your site is performing above or below average:

• Blogs: 65-90%
• Landing pages: 60-90%
• B2B websites: 25-55%
• eCommerce: 20-45%

As you can see, the average bounce rate varies wildly based on the type of site.

You might be worried if your blog has a bounce rate of 85%, but that would be totally normal. The reason is that most visitors will come from Google, find the answer they need in one post, and then leave. There’s nothing wrong with your site; that’s just how people behave.

Alternatively, an eCommerce site with a bounce rate of 85% would be a huge failure. Normally, visitors will at least browse a few items before leaving, and that’s why the bounce rate tends to be much lower.

You can learn more about the bounce rate metric and how to optimize for it here:

What’s a Good Bounce Rate (And How to Improve It)

Next up, let’s cover some exit rate benchmarks.

What’s a good exit rate?

Exit rates vary based on the type of page, the same way that bounce rates vary based on the type of site.

Here are some rough estimates of what healthy exit rates look like for different types of pages:

• Article: 60-90%
• Homepage: 40-60%
• Product page: 40-60%
• Category page: 20-40%

Exit rates are higher than bounce rates due to the nature of the metric.

If you are seeing a much higher exit rate on any page on your site, check it for obvious issues like broken formatting, missing images, or a misleading title.

A simple tactic for reducing the exit rate of a page (and the bounce rate) is to drive visitors from high-exit-rate pages to low-exit-rate pages. You can do this via smart internal linking and exit-intent popups.

Of course, you can only optimize a page’s exit rate if you first know how to track it.

How to track exit rates

If you’re unsure how to track the exit rates of your pages, you can install our free WordPress plugin, Independent Analytics.

It installs in seconds and begins tracking right away. You’ll see your visitors and a wealth of metrics all inside the WordPress admin dashboard.

In the data table, you can enable the Exit Rate column to view the exit rate of every page on your site. You can evaluate it alongside other metrics like bounce rate and total exits too.

Sorting by exit rate will allow you to easily find the pages where your visitors are most (and least) likely to exit.

As you browse this data, you should see patterns that match the benchmarks above. For instance, your category archives should top the list as the lowest exit rate pages, and your articles should have the highest exit rates.

Optimize your pages for exit rate

In this guide, you’ve learned that your site doesn’t have an exit rate, but rather, each page on your site has its own unique exit rate.

Additionally, bounce rate is a good site-wide metric for understanding how often people quickly exit your website.

If you’re using WordPress and need a good tool to track the exit rates of your pages, you can use our free plugin:

It makes it easy to evaluate the exit rate of every page, as well as the bounce rate of your site and individual pages.

Thanks for reading this guide on what a good exit rate is, and please post below if you have any questions or comments.

UTM parameters have been a crucial tool for online marketers for decades, and they’re just as useful now as ever.

They’re so widely used that every marketer needs a firm understanding of what they are and how they’re used. That’s why we wrote this guide, and in it you’ll learn:

• Why you should use UTM parameters
• What the five UTM parameters are
• How to create URLs with UTM parameters
• How to track results from UTM parameters
• What “UTM” stands for

Let’s dive in with an explanation of why you should be using UTM parameters for your marketing campaigns.

What are UTM parameters used for?

UTM parameters are a set of standardized URL parameters.

You’ve undoubtedly seen URL parameters before. They look something like this (bolded part):

https://example.com/some-page?video=1

The purpose of a URL parameter is to send additional information to a website. For example, the parameter above might tell the site to autoplay a video that normally waits for the user to start.

Likewise, UTM parameters convey additional information; they tell you where the visitor came from. For instance, a URL with UTM parameters might look like this:

https://example.com/some-page?utm_campaign=Free+Ebook&utm_medium=Social+Media&utm_source=Facebook

Looking at this URL, you can tell that it’d be used to promote a free ebook on Facebook.

Since these parameters are formatted in a predictable way, such as utm_source, analytics tools can read this information and then report on them.

In other words, the point of using UTM parameters is so you can track exactly where your visitors are coming from. Rather than knowing you had 100 visitors from Facebook, you can know you had 70 visitors from your free ebook post and another 30 from a link you left in a comment.

As you can understand, this makes UTM parameters invaluable for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You should use them virtually everywhere you can to get the most accurate data possible.

UTM URLs are also commonly referred to as campaign URLs.

What are the five UTM parameters?

The example above demonstrated three of the parameters, all of which are required, but there are five UTM parameters in total.

utm_campaign: This parameter is used to name the campaign itself. You can think of it as the “title” of the link.

utm_medium: The medium is the marketing channel used. For instance, it might be email, social media, or PPC.

utm_source: This is the specific source the link will be placed on, like YouTube, Facebook, or AdWords.

utm_content (optional): If you have multiple links on the same page, this parameter can be used to distinguish them. For instance, you might want to track performance separately for a link in the introduction of a sales email vs. a link in the conclusion.

utm_term (optional): The last parameter is used mainly for paid search. You can add the keywords used in bidding here to keep track of their performance.

Now that you’re familiar with all of the parameters let’s talk about how to create your own campaign links.

How to create links with UTM parameters

Creating your campaign URLs is very easy.

You could type out the parameters yourself, but this is an error-prone practice, and you don’t want to miss out on data due to silly human error.

There are quite a few campaign URL builders available, but we’ll share a couple here.

First, if you’re using WordPress, then we recommend our plugin, Independent Analytics.

The free version provides a full-featured analytics suite right inside the WP admin dashboard.

There’s also a Pro version, and this includes a campaign reporting dashboard as well as a dedicated campaign builder.

For non-WordPress users, there are a few free tools available, but you can’t go wrong with the official campaign URL builder provided by Google.

All you have to do is enter the required fields, and it will generate a properly formatted campaign URL, ready for tracking.

The only downside is that it doesn’t save the URLs you’ve created in the past, so you may want to keep track of them in a spreadsheet.

Speaking of tracking, let’s cover how you can see how many clicks these campaign links get.

How to track your own UTM URLs

Most web analytics tools have some way of tracking campaign URLs.

Independent Analytics Pro includes a campaigns report that displays all your traffic, organized by unique campaign.

You can clearly see the number of visitors from each campaign along with performance metrics, such as session duration and bounce rate. You can also filter by any table column to view data for specific campaigns.

If you’re selling products with WooCommerce, you’ll also appreciate the WooCommerce integration that allows you to see the number of sales and conversion rate of each campaign.

Independent Analytics is made exclusively for WordPress, so if you’re using another CMS, you might prefer Clicky or Google Analytics instead. They’re both full-featured analytics tools and include campaign tracking.

What does UTM stand for?

After all this talk about UTM parameters, you might be wondering, “What does UTM stand for anyway?”

UTM stands for “Urchin tracking module.” Urchin was an early web analytics tool that Google acquired in 2005 and rebranded as Google Analytics.

Since the “UTM” parameters were already used widely, Google kept the naming convention intact. Fast forward a couple of decades, and these URL parameters are used more widely than ever before. Virtually all marketing tools recognize these same five URL parameters, so they’re here to stay.

Start using UTM parameters today

URL parameters are a common way to add more info to URLs. The UTM parameters are so popular that it’s given all marketers a standardized way to track where their visitors are coming from.

In addition to counting visitors, these URLs are also critical for gauging the ROI of paid ad campaigns.

If you don’t have an analytics tool of choice already, check out our free plugin, Independent Analytics

The free version includes all the essentials you need for web analytics, and there’s a Pro upgrade that adds campaign tracking, WooCommece integration, real-time analytics, and more.

Thanks for following our guide on the definition of UTM parameters and how they’re used. You can leave a comment below if you have any further questions.

Sessions, views per page, exit rates, etc.

What do they all mean??

While there is a lot of jargon to learn, you’ll soon appreciate how helpful and concise these terms are.

Bounce rate and exit rate are both valuable metrics that can quickly provide deep insights into your visitors’ behavior.

In this guide, we’ll clearly define both and then make a simple comparison so you know exactly what the difference is between exit rate and bounce rate.

Let’s get started!

Exit Rate vs. Bounce Rate

To make the difference between these metrics clear, let’s start by defining each one individually.

What exactly is Exit Rate?

Exit rate tells you how often a page was the last page in a session whenever it’s viewed.

Imagine someone views the following pages:

1. Page A
2. Page B
3. Page C

They entered the site on Page A and exited on Page C. These three pageviews combined are called a session. If this was the only session, then the exit rate of Page C would be 100% because it’s the exit page 100% of the time it’s viewed. On the other hand, Pages A and B would have an exit rate of 0% because they have never been exited from.

Now imagine a second person has the following session on your site:

1. Page C
2. Page B

Page C has now been viewed twice and has only been the exit page once, so its exit rate is 50%. And to make things perfectly clear, let’s add a third session:

1. Page B
2. Page A

After this session, Page C still has an exit rate of 50%. It’s important to note that the exit rate is a page metric, not a site metric. A page with an exit rate of 50% doesn’t mean half of your sessions end there; it means it’s the last page of a session half the time it’s viewed.

Exit rate only makes sense as a page-level metric. Technically, the exit rate of your site is 100% because everyone eventually leaves

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate tells you how many visitors only viewed one page before leaving. In other words, it is the percentage of single-page sessions.

As an example, imagine someone visited your site and looked at three pages. Your site’s bounce rate would be 0% because there are no single-page sessions. If a second visitor viewed one page and then left, your site’s bounce rate would increase to 50%.

A bounce rate of 50% means that half of your visitors only look at one page before leaving.

Unlike exit rates, bounce rates can be calculated for both your site and individual pages. For instance, if a page has a bounce rate of 70%, this means that 70% of the time it’s viewed, it’s the only page viewed.

If you see a page with a high bounce rate, this is most often due to a lot of search traffic. Visitors find the answer to their questions and then leave without viewing more pages.

So what’s the difference?

In conclusion, exit rate tells you how often a page is the last page in a session whenever it’s viewed, while bounce rate tells you how often visitors only look at one page before leaving.

While they initially sound similar, now you know they’re not alike at all.

Now that you understand how to use these metrics let’s talk about how to track them.

How to track exit rate and bounce rate

If you’re using WordPress, you can try our free plugin, Independent Analytics.

It adds a beautiful and responsive analytics suite to the WP admin dashboard. And as an alternative to Google Analytics, it’s much simpler and more privacy-friendly.

As you can see, the analytics dashboard is readily available inside your site and includes data on your pages, referrers, geographic locations, and visitor devices.

Where to find your bounce rate

The Bounce Rate metric is highlighted in the main stats that appear in every report.

Here, you can see it reported alongside other important metrics, like total visitors and session duration:

Bounce rate is a versatile metric, so you can also find it reported for every page, traffic source, and country.

This goes beyond page analysis and allows you to find locations and traffic sources with higher (or lower) than average bounce rates.

Where to find the exit rates

Since exit rate is a page-level metric, this can be found only in the Pages report. It can be enabled alongside similar metrics, like Entrances and Total Exits.

You can click on any metric to sort the table and immediately find the pages with the highest exit rate or the most total exits.

These metrics are tracked automatically, so all you have to do is install the plugin, and data will start showing up in real-time.

How to optimize your site using exit rates & bounce rates

If you’re unsure how to use these metrics to improve your website, here are a few tips:

• Sort your pages from the lowest to the highest bounce rate to find the most engaging ones. Use these pages as a model for the rest of your site.
• Pay attention to the bounce rates of individual referrers. You may want to deprioritize a marketing channel that sends high bounce rate traffic, even if you get a lot of visitors.
• Find your low exit rate pages and try to drive more traffic internally to them.
• Look at your highest exit rate pages and brainstorm ways to extend the session, even if it’s just by one more page view.
• If you can’t reduce the exit rate for a page, settle for an exit popup so you can collect an email address before they leave.

Start tracking new metrics today

At first glance, bounce rate and exit rate seem like similar metrics.

However, once you understand the intricacies of these metrics, you realize that they are not alike at all.

If you need a good way to track the bounce rate and exit rate of your pages, try our free plugin:

It installs in seconds and starts recording data right away.

Thanks for reading this guide on the differences between exit rate vs. bounce rate, and feel free to post any comments below.