We know many of you have been eagerly awaiting new metrics, and the first of them is now available in your dashboards!

Once you update, you'll find the new Session Duration metric featured prominently in the Quick Stats:

Session Duration tells you how long people spend on your site when they visit, on average. This metric appears in the Quick Stats of each page, and it also shows up in the table for referrers, geolocations, and campaigns.

For the Pages menu, you'll see View Duration instead of Session Duration in the table. View Duration tells you how long visitors look at a page, on average.

Since these metrics are built off of our session-based tracking system, they're available retroactively. In other words, you can see Session Duration and View Duration for the past few months rather than starting today.

You'll also notice that the Quick Stats have a lighter font and new icon, but more importantly, the filtered values now show inside the same boxes rather than getting their own.

We found this to be a more visually pleasing and readable layout.

What you wouldn't guess from this update is that 90% of the changes didn't make it into the changelog. Our first crack at adding session duration exposed a weakness in our query design and slowed down the dashboard massively. There was an overhaul of this system, and after the refactor, we were able to include the new duration metrics without affecting performance negatively. 

Most of the top-voted requests here are for metrics, so we're going to keep our foot on the gas and include a handful more metrics before turning our attention to anything else.

Next up, we'll be adding Bounce Rate and Pages Per Session, so you can expect those in your dashboard soon!

If you tried viewing your analytics on your phone in the past, we're sorry.

It was a complete garbled mess, but no longer! Independent Analytics is now just as beautiful and intuitive on mobile devices as desktop monitors.

The table was completely unusable before but is now readable and easy to navigate. There's vertical scrolling to scan through your rows and horizontal scrolling to navigate through the columns.

The mobile design was the biggest feature of this update, but we also fixed numerous bugs, the most prominent of which was the REST API notice.

We have a method of testing whether the REST API is enabled or not, but as it turns out, this is much more complex than we anticipated. We inadvertently ended up displaying these notices on sites due to false positives.

In v1.22, we stripped out our automated checks entirely so that warning only displays if you're using a plugin that is definitely blocking the REST API, like Disable WP REST API.

There's one more aspect of version 1.22 that we need to discuss...

We really wanted to include the Average Session Duration metric in this release, but we couldn't quite get there. We have the functionality working, but the queries were taking too long and making the dashboard too slow.

We're in the midst of optimizing these queries now, which will allow us to ship this feature without slowing down the dashboard. We expect to include the Average Session Duration metric in our next update, v1.23.

Today's update brings massive performance improvements to the Referrers menu. 

If you have a small website, then you may not have experienced any issues, but for sites with 1,000+ sites in the Referrers menu, you likely saw load times as slow as 20 seconds. 

As much as we love adding new features, these load times were too cumbersome and needed to be addressed ASAP. With the new improvements in version 1.21, even sites with thousands of referrers should see the menu load completely in 3-5 seconds.

In version 1.20, we've done a lot of housekeeping. There were many small bug fixes and code improvements that will make IA even more reliable and hardy moving forward.

While critical, we know these kinds of updates are boring, so we also tossed in a fun new feature 🙂

In the Pages report, you can now display the Comments column:

This column shows how many comments each post/page has received in the given time period.

While you can find total comments in the Posts menu, we thought it'd be cool to see the number of comments in a given period. If any post is getting a lot of engagement via the comments, it could be a good idea to feature it on your site to boost engagement even further.

Like other columns, you can also sort and filter by the number of comments.

Hey everyone,

Our next update will include a handful of bug fixes and code-hardening improvements. We wanted to toss in something fun as well, so we're adding a new data column that will show you how many comments each post/page has. This will give you an easy way to find the articles on your site with the most comments, which could be a good source of inspiration for future content.

Since this update is relatively small, it should be out fairly soon. After that, we will be making some major performance improvements. For large sites, the Referrers menu can load quite slowly, and we aim to get the load time under two seconds for everyone, regardless of how many thousands of referrers there are.

In this update, we've added the new Sessions metric to the dashboard:

Sessions are reported in the stats, chart, and in a new data table column. This means you can also sort and filter pages/referrers/geolocations by sessions.

You will see Sessions data immediately because we started tracking them internally in version 1.17. For that reason, you may see Sessions recorded from the past month but not any further back than when you updated to 1.17.

A session is a single experience someone has with your website. For instance, if someone visited your blog, read five posts, and left, this would be counted as 1 visitor, 5 views, and 1 session. If they return the next day, view one page, and leave, the new totals would be 1 visitor, 6 views, and 2 sessions.

Figuring out when a session has ended is difficult, but we've decided to use a 30-minute cut-off, which is what Google Analytics does too. In other words, if someone does not view a new page within 30 minutes, the session is concluded, and any future page views will be counted toward a new session.

Now that sessions are fully implemented, we are getting ready to add more metrics, like Pages per Session and Average Session Duration.

We also have a number of performance updates we'd like to include. For large sites, the dashboard can load quite slowly, especially the Geographic menu. Additionally, there are some duplicate data in the database that we can clean up, and this may greatly reduce the amount of space that Independent Analytics takes up in the database.

This update primarily improved the WooCommerce integration for PRO users, and added a few other bug fixes.

If you customize the columns in the Referrers, Campaigns, or Geographic menus, you'll find three new metrics for WooCommerce:

These metrics make it even easier to find your most profitable marketing tactics. 

Before, you may have sorted your referrers by Net Sales to see which ones have generated the most revenue.

Now, you can do things like sort by the conversion rate, which will uncover referrers that may not have created many sales but have converted very effectively. These are the best channels to double down on and try to grow further.

In our first iteration of the WC integration, we only added columns. Now, you can see your Orders and Net Sales in the Quick Stats of every page as well as in the charts.

Other improvements to Independent Analytics include:

The next update is going to add a new metric called "sessions." You may be familiar with sessions already, but here's the idea...

If someone visits your site and views five pages, Independent Analytics would record 1 visitor and 5 views. With the next update, this would also record 1 session. Likewise, if that same visitor returned the next day and viewed only 1 page before leaving, your analytics would show a total of 1 visitor, 6 views, and 2 sessions.

In other words, sessions group views that occur together, giving you a better reading of how often someone arrives on your site and explores it. This metric will also open up the door for session-based metrics, such as pages per session and average session duration.

We know that average visit time and pages per session are two of the most highly-requested features, and we will implement them soon!

When adding the WooCommerce integration in version 1.17, we realized that major structural changes to the database were needed to attribute sales to the correct referrers/locations/campaigns. This took much longer than anticipated and slowed us down quite a bit. However, it set the groundwork for new metrics.

If you're running version 1.17 on your sites, you're actually recording sessions already. We aren't displaying this data yet, but behind the scenes, every visitor and their pageviews are being saved together as unique sessions.

When we add the Sessions metric to the dashboard, you will already have a few weeks of this data recorded. Furthermore, the implementation of session tracking enables us to calculate how long visitors spend on each page, how long their sessions last, and how many pages they visit per session. It also opens up the possibility for other exciting features, like a landing pages report. We hope to add these metrics in the next couple of updates.

Thanks for following along with us on this journey! If you want to get notifications for these types of updates, you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter where we share these posts and more.

This release is huge! 

It took much longer than we expected, but we're thrilled to finally go live with version 1.17. Here's what it includes:

For Pro users, we have a brand new integration with WooCommerce. This adds new columns that display data like your orders, refunds, and net sales to the Referrers, Geographic, and Campaign reports.

This will make it easy to compare the performance of various marketing channels and campaigns.

Learn more about the WC integration

Another exciting update for Independent Analytics Pro is the addition of email reports. The monthly email report can be configured rapidly from the Settings menu and will send out a neat PDF report like this:

Learn more about Email reports

One of the best parts of Independent Analytics is its native integration with WordPress. It allows us to ship features that are way easier to use than competing analytics products like Google Analytics.

With the new user role blocking feature, you can ignore views from any user role in just a few clicks.

For membership sites, this will be extremely useful because you can simultaneously track logged-in Subscribers while ignoring traffic from the Admins and Editors.

Learn more about user role blocking

Due to better attribution, you will see your Direct views decrease in the Referrers report while views to other traffic sources will increase. Up until now, the number of views attributed to the Direct referrer has been inflated.

The WooCommerce integration required a lot more back-end changes than we anticipated, which is why it took us over a month to get this release out. Well, that along with the (welcome) disruption caused by year-end holidays ;)

As part of this release, we had to create session tracking to attribute WC sales to the proper referrer. You will not see Sessions appear in the dashboard just yet, but most of the work is already complete. This has opened the door for other highly anticipated metrics, like Average Time on Site and Pages Per Visit. We hope to have these metrics added to the dashboard soon, as they should be relatively easy to implement now that session tracking has been added.

I'll be the first to admit that the 1.16 update isn't as exciting as 1.15, but we needed to tackle some much-needed bug fixes and UX enhancements.

Here's what we changed.

Independent Analytics now reminds you to clear your cache after activating it on your site, which allows it to start recording views right away.

It can also detect if the REST API is currently blocked, which prevents it from recording any data. This has been an issue for quite a few users since launch. The new notification will make it clear there is an issue right away, and it has built-in detection for the most popular plugins that block REST API requests.

We also made the decision to sort the data table by Visitors instead of Views and have given the Visitors metric more visual priority in the interface. This seemed like a more logical way to look at the data i.e. I want to see how many people visited my site and then see how many pages they viewed, not the other way around.

Lastly, we were really excited to include Views Growth and Visitors Growth in version 1.15, but we found that they cluttered the table. We've decided to hide these columns by default as they aren't necessary for daily observation. You can display them again easily with the Edit Columns button.

Thanks for keeping up with our development progress!

If you've been following the roadmap, then you've already seen that scheduled email reports and WooCommerce analytics are on the way. We had to make a pit stop at version 1.16 to release these bug fixes and enhancements, but in version 1.17, we will be completely focused on those two features.

This update brings the second major feature to Independent Analytics Pro and valuable new insights for all users via the Views/Visitors Growth columns.

We're thrilled to release Real-time analytics, which has been requested quite a lot since the launch of Independent Analytics. This dashboard shows you how many people are on your site, what pages they're viewing, what sites referred them to you, and what countries they came from.

You can see a glimpse of the progress bar at the bottom of the page, which lets you know when the date is going to refresh. We settled on updating the dashboard every ten seconds, as this gives you enough time to read the data without it changing too rapidly (or taking too many server resources).

You can get the Real-time analytics dashboard now with a copy of Independent Analytics Pro, which is still on sale for 60% off until the end of Cyber Monday. After that, we'll be permanently reducing this discount.

The Real-time Analytics dashboard was definitely the "star of the show," but there's another awesome feature that everyone's getting.

Once you update to version 1.15, you'll find two new columns in the dashboard showing you how much more (or less) popular each page has become:

This lets you rapidly uncover your growing and "slowing" pages. You can sort by the highest/lowest growth in a single click, and these columns are available in the Referrers, Geographic, and Campaigns dashboards too.

Besides those two changes, we've also added the ability to white-label the analytics dashboard for non-admins and included support for blocking IP addresses with wildcards.

There's also been a bug affecting some users' ability to view the data table, and that's been sorted out.

Overall, this has been a pretty big release for us. In our next update, we're looking to improve the dashboard performance for bigger sites and add scheduled email reports. 

There are SO many other features we can't wait to implement, from WooCommerce sales data to the Time on Page metric. Know that we're hard at work, bringing as many of these tools to our users as fast as we can.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the new update!

Today's update is a small one.

First off, we've added percentages next to the view and visitor count for each row. This means you can look at a page and see it's responsible for 15% of your total views or see that Google sends you 40% of your traffic.

We also added a Dutch translation - thank you to Ivan!

And lastly, there was an error for some environments that could cause the sorting to be incorrect when the dashboard was first loaded. That is now fixed.

It's been a month since our last update, but this one's a doozy. In version 1.13, we've added a few highly requested features.

You may have noticed that if you refresh the page, you lose your settings, such as the date range and filters. This is now a thing of the past.

The URL in your browser now updates as you make changes, so you can refresh the page and keep your current settings, and you can save URLs for later.

Basically, you can customize the dashboard until you're viewing something highly specific, like Blog posts with 100 or more views, and then copy that URL and save it somewhere, like Apple Notes or Notion. Then you can simply visit that URL again to pull up the same report without needing to set the filters again.

Learn more about report URLs

If you're the only one working on your site, it's pretty easy to make sure you're always logged in, and then Independent Analytics won't record your visits.

But if you have a team, and many of them don't have logins, their activity can skew your data. This is why it's important to block these IP addresses, and now you can via the new IP blocking section added to the Settings menu

Learn how to block IPs

The last major feature of this update is the ability to grant permission to non-admins to view the analytics.

Up until now, only admins on the site could view the analytics, but there are many good reasons why you might want editors or other user roles to see this data too.

With the new User permission section in the Settings menu, it's simple to give other user roles analytics access.

Learn how to edit user permissions

You'll probably notice that when you navigate between menus, the date no longer changes. We've found that this is the more user-friendly behavior and makes it easier to do things like find today's top pages and then today's top referrers and locations.

In version 1.14, we hope to add some exciting new features for our Independent Analytics Pro users. Speaking of which, the 60% discount is still available for annual and lifetime subscriptions.

If you want a say in what we build next, head over to the Feature Request page to submit new ideas and upvote your favorites.

Hey all,

We've just launched this feedback board and will be posting updates regularly here. This is a good place to check if you want to know about:

We also publish tutorials and product updates on our blog if you'd like to follow there.