Plausible Analytics Settings and Usage: Step-by-Step Setup

If you’re interested in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you might not be familiar with Plausible Analytics settings and usage. It’s a powerful tool that simplifies analyzing website traffic and user behavior. Let’s delve into this tool and how it can benefit you.

Plausible Analytics Settings and Usage: Simplifying Web Analytics ∞

Plausible Analytics is a user-friendly web analytics tool. It’s designed to provide essential website statistics in a simple, easy-to-understand format. With Plausible Analytics, you don’t need prior experience or training to analyze your website’s performance.

Real-time Insights with Plausible Analytics

One of the standout features of Plausible Analytics Settings and Usage is its real-time dashboard. This feature allows you to monitor your website’s activity as it happens. You can see the number of current visitors and what they’re doing on your site, giving you live insights into your website’s performance.

Detailed Traffic Analysis

With Plausible Analytics, you can filter your dashboard to focus on specific metrics. The feature allows segmenting of the audience and analysis of traffic from particular marketing campaigns or landing pages. This granular approach to data analysis can help you optimize your website accordingly.

Identifying Top Traffic Sources and Pages

Plausible Analytics settings and usage comprehensively overview your top traffic sources and most visited pages. This information can help you understand where your traffic is coming from and which pages attract the most attention.

Tracking Goals and Conversions

Another critical feature of Plausible Analytics is its ability to track events and goals. This feature lets you identify the number of unique visitors who convert and the referral sites that drive the most conversions.

Difference Between Plausible Analytics and Google Analytics ∞

Regarding website analytics, Plausible Analytics settings and usage are superior to Google Analytics. This comparison will help you understand why Plausible Analytics is a preferred choice for many.

Embracing Simplicity with Plausible Analytics Usage

Unlike Google Analytics, which can be complex and time-consuming to understand, Plausible Analytics is designed for simplicity. It provides a user-friendly dashboard that presents all essential website traffic insights at a glance, making it an ideal choice.

Data Ownership and Privacy

One of the critical advantages of Plausible Analytics is the full ownership and control it gives you over your website data. Unlike Google Analytics, your data is not shared with advertising companies or any third parties, ensuring the privacy of your website visitors.

Open Source and Compliance with Privacy Regulations

Plausible Analytics is an open-source tool, meaning its source code is publicly accessible for review. This transparency and compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and PECR make it a trustworthy choice for website analytics.

Enhancing User Experience

Plausible Analytics settings and usage do not require GDPR, CCPA, PECR, or cookie consent prompts, providing visitors with a better user experience. In contrast, Google Analytics requires these prompts, which some users consider inconvenient.

Lightweight and Adblocker-Friendly

Plausible Analytics is a lightweight tool that doesn’t significantly impact page load times. Moreover, unlike Google Analytics, it’s usually not covered by adblockers as it doesn’t track personal data or use cookies.

Pricing and Support for Independent Web

While Google Analytics is free, it’s run by an ad-tech company that collects and analyzes personal data. Plausible Analytics usage charges a fee, but it doesn’t collect personal data or monetize your data. By choosing Plausible, you support independent web developers and businesses.

Why Avoid Using WordPress Plugins for Built-in Statistics and Analytics ∞

Several WordPress plugins gather the analytics directly on the WordPress site to the database. It would be best if you avoided these at any cost. They bloat the database with statistics data and write to it non-stop, lowering your site’s overall performance and affecting your SEO.

Choosing Your Analytics Infrastructure ∞

While Google Analytics is free, you must add information about it in several places over the Privacy Policy, Cookie Consent, and other policies. This is unlike Plausible Analytics, where you don’t need to state that you gather all this data about your users (only a minimal statement about usage) and don’t need a cookie consent bar if you don’t use any other third-party cookies. This is important to understand when implementing your policies. The Cookie consent banner can slow down your site since there will be more requests for files like JavaScript and CSS to show the cookie consent banner.

Moreover, multiple multinational data privacy laws, like GDPR, invalidate the legitimacy of Google Analytics under certain circumstances. For instance, GDPR states that the service’s servers must be in Europe. In contrast, most Google Analytics servers are located in the US. In the past, several EU-US data privacy frameworks would allow GA usage. However, some are already invalid, and there is probably more to be proposed to make GA usage valid again. Since privacy laws change constantly and there is no easy fix for Google Analytics, it is another victory for Plausible Analytics. Plausible have servers in the EU and fully GDRP compliant.

Plausible Analytics also has a Google Analytics versus Plausible Analytics Comparison page.
Of course, the content is biased, but there are technological facts that can’t be argued with.

Plausible Analytics Settings and Usage: Signing Up ∞

Navigate to the Plausible Analytics website.
In the top right corner, click [Start free trial]. There were 30 days of trial period at the time of this writing.
Fill in your details and the email we created for the site, and click [Start free trial].
Fetch the validation code from your email and paste it into the “Activate your account” page, then click [Activate].
On the “Your website details” page, add your naked domain (without the “www” prefix, even if you used it). Then click [Add snippet].

On the “Add JavaScript snippet,” you will see a Plausible Analytics snippet to add to your site. Since we’re using WordPress, we will use the plugin instead. At this point, open our Plausible Analytics WordPress Integration guide, then return here to continue.

Click [Start collecting data].

Leave the “Waiting for first pageview” page open.

Note: When the trial period ends, you must add your payment details for either monthly or annual subscriptions.

Plausible Analytics Settings and Usage: Adding a Website ∞

Plausible Analytics supports 50 sites on the same payment plan.
Just log in to your account and click [Add Site].
Follow the previous procedure from the “Your website details” page.

All pageviews are aggregated between sites on the same payment plan.

For example, choosing the low-cost plan of 10,000 monthly page views counts from all the websites you added.

Plausible Analytics Settings and Usage: Importing Data From Google Analytics ∞

Suppose you already have a site with Google Analytics and have data there. In that case, you can import it into Plausible Analytics.

Navigate to the Plausible Analytics website.
Login to your account.

You will see a rectangle with your site domain. A Gear icon Settings button will be on the right side of the rectangle. Click it.
On the [General] tab at the bottom of the page, you will see the “Data Import from Google Analytics” section. Click the [Continue with Google] button.

Plausible Analytics Settings and Usage: Integrating to WordPress Website ∞

To continue setting up Plausible Analytics, see our guide on installing and setting up the Plausible Analytics WordPress plugin.

If you find any mistakes or have ideas for improvement, please follow the email on the Contact page.