Easy to use, actionable and privacy-compliant analytics for ecommerce and startups

Plausible Analytics helps ecommerce and SaaS startups get some actionable data to make better decisions. At the same time, their visitors keep having a privacy-friendly and enjoyable experience.

Plausible Analytics is compliant with different privacy regulations so you don’t need to worry about getting GDPR consent from your visitors. We keep it simple by minimizing data collection and focusing on 20% of Google Analytics metrics that 80% of analytics users find most useful.

1. Get actionable insights from your key traffic and referral metrics
2. Follow the user journey from paid ad to conversion
   1. Track marketing campaigns using UTM tags
   2. Set up custom goals and events to track conversions
   3. Build sales and marketing funnels
   4. Seamless cross-subdomain tracking
3. Send monetary values to track your ecommerce revenue
4. Add properties to an event or pageview to create custom metrics
5. Filter the dashboard by anything you click on
6. Invite team members and collaborate
7. Share your stats via email or unique links
8. Simplified compliance with the privacy regulations
9. Build faster loading websites
10. Get accurate data
11. Try Plausible Analytics

Get actionable insights from your key traffic and referral metrics

Getting actionable insights from traditional web analytics tools can be a cumbersome, time-consuming and painful process. Plausible is built with simplicity in mind. Our dashboard is simple to understand without having any prior experience, training or support.

Everything you need to know is on one page. There are no layers of menus. There is no need for you to build custom reports and dashboards. You get an overview in one minute and can get on with tasks that you enjoy more, such as creating new content or building your audience.

You get actionable insights at a glance to analyze and understand the effectiveness of your marketing and user acquisition tactics:

• Number of visitors coming to your site
• Where in the world your visitors are based
• What devices, operating systems and browsers your visitors use
• What are the referral sources of your traffic
• The duration of a session depending on the referral source
• What pages are your visitors landing on
• What’s the bounce percentage of your visitors

And much more. You can see our live demo for full details on actionable metrics you get access to.

Follow the user journey from paid ad to conversion

With Plausible Analytics, you can follow the user journey from a paid advertising campaign to a conversion on your website. You do that by tagging your marketing campaigns with UTM tags and by setting up custom goals on your site:

Track marketing campaigns using UTM tags

UTM parameters are a useful tool for businesses. They help you get more insights into the dark traffic and identify specific campaigns or pieces of content that deliver the best conversions.

Dark traffic includes clicks from emails, messenger apps, bookmarks and social media. You cannot see which referrer sources are sending that traffic.

A solution to minimize dark traffic is to tag links using utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. Plausible has full UTM tag support out-of-the-box.

When you have tagged links in your email campaigns and social media advertising, you see clicks on these links in your Plausible dashboard. With UTM tags, you can:

• Track your email marketing campaigns
• Compare paid vs. organic social media activities
• Check the results of individual social media posts
• Analyze influencers, affiliates and creators you’re sponsoring
• Analyze your guest blogging and content syndication campaigns

See “how to use UTM parameters to track your campaigns and understand the dark traffic”.

Set up custom goals and events to track conversions

With Plausible Analytics, you can set up the goal and event tracking to figure out your conversion rates and understand the percentage of visitors who sign up for your service or buy your product.

Goals can be any action that you want your users to take: visit a specific page URL, sign up to a newsletter, click on the “Download” button, register for a trial account or complete the checkout form of an ecommerce store.

With goals and events, you can track the number of goals completed, conversion rates and other useful insights, including referrer sources driving conversions.

Here are the instructions on how to get started with goals and events.

Build sales and marketing funnels

After you have your custom events in place, you can also start building sales and marketing funnels. The insights from the sales funnel allow you to uncover possible issues, optimize your site and increase the conversion rate. Here are the instructions on how to get started with funnels.

Seamless cross-subdomain tracking

Does your business operate on a single domain name with multiple subdomains such as docs.yourdomain.com, app.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com?

Plausible helps you simplify cross-subdomain tracking. You can view the visitor journey end-to-end from the landing on your primary domain name to a conversion on the subdomain.

The original referral source will stay attributed to that visitor even when the visitor moves from one of your subdomains to another.

Any conversions that happen on your subdomains will be attributed to the original referral source that brought the visitor to your main domain. There’s no need to filter out internal referral sources as this eliminates the issue where you might see your subdomains as a major source of traffic.

See more on our hostname or subdomain tracking.

Send monetary values to track your ecommerce revenue

You can send dynamic monetary values alongside custom events to track revenue for your ecommerce store. Revenue attribution helps you determine which marketing campaigns and landing pages result in the most revenue.

Our revenue tracking supports multi-currencies too. You’ll be able to see total revenue and average order revenue in your dashboard:

The revenue metrics are fully filterable. For instance, you can see the total or average revenue for a particular custom event per any dimension such as a specific date, referral source, marketing campaign, entry page, country or device.

Also see: How to boost ecommerce sales by tracking revenue attribution in web analytics

Add properties to an event or pageview to create custom metrics

You can create your custom metrics in Plausible Analytics. You do this by adding properties to your events or pageviews to collect and analyze data that Plausible Analytics doesn’t automatically track. When sending an event, you can attach arbitrary metadata to it. This helps you:

• Compare different website elements
• Track the number of clicks on outbound links
• Track the number of file downloads
• Do A/B testing

And anything else that you wish. You can then filter and sort your goals by event properties in your Plausible Analytics dashboard. Learn more about custom properties for events here. And custom properties for pageviews here.

Note that you must ensure that no personally identifiable information (PII) is sent to Plausible Analytics when you collect the metadata. PII is information that could be used on its own to identify, contact, or precisely locate an individual. This includes:

• full names or usernames
• email addresses
• mailing addresses
• phone numbers
• credit card information
• passport numbers
• precise locations
• IP addresses
• pseudonymous cookie IDs, advertising IDs or other pseudonymous end user identifiers

Filter the dashboard by anything you click on

You have your web metrics, your UTM tagged visitors are coming in, and you’ve set up goals and events with different labels so you’re tracking custom metrics too.

The way you can dig more in-depth and get further insights is by filtering. Click on any metric on your Plausible Analytics dashboard to filter your dashboard by it:

• Click on any referral source to isolate all the traffic sent by that referral source and understand visitors and conversions coming from there
• Click on any page to filter all the traffic by visitors who’ve seen that page
• Click on any country to only analyze visitors coming from that country

And on and on. All metrics are clickable.

What’s even better is the fact that you can mix and match filters. Want to understand visitors coming from Facebook who’ve visited your home page, are located in the United States and using Chrome as a browser on iOS? You can do that by selecting those filters.

You can add multiple filters to create audience segments too. This allows you to see the conversions and revenue from for instance the audience segment that’s located in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, that were referred by a particular UTM campaign and are using Mac OS.

Explore this on the live demo.

Invite team members and collaborate

Plausible makes it easy to invite team members, clients and other collaborators. You can invite team members and also assign their roles.

You can choose to give people access to the stats dashboard only or give them the permission to edit site settings and invite other collaborators.

You can learn more about user accounts and levels.

Share your stats via email or unique links

You can share your Plausible Analytics reports and dashboard in multiple ways, both privately and publicly.

Email reports can be sent to multiple recipients and scheduled weekly (every Monday) or monthly (every 1st of the month). All the stats are embedded directly in the email and there’s no need to go to any website. There are no attachments, no PDFs and no links to click on. No friction.

You can also share your website dashboard privately and securely by generating a unique shared link. This link is impossible to guess, so only people you send it to will have access to it. No need to log in, no need for accounts and passwords either. You do have the option to password protect the link for extra security.

You can even open up your Plausible Analytics dashboard to the public and proudly share it with the world like we’re sharing our stats in the live demo.

Simplified compliance with the privacy regulations

Plausible Analytics is compliant with the different privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and PECR out of the box. We don’t use cookies and we don’t collect or store any personally identifiable information from your visitors either. You can see our data policy for full details on metrics we collect about your visitors on your behalf.

You 100% own and control all of your website data. We do not collect and analyze personal information from web users and we do not use behavioral insights to sell advertisements. We do not sell or share your site data with any third-parties.

All this means that you don’t need to worry about having a cookie banner nor annoy your visitors asking for their GDPR consent when using Plausible Analytics. See full details on what makes Plausible a privacy-first web analytics tool.

Build faster loading websites

Every KB makes a difference when you want to optimize your site for speed. Plausible Analytics script is lightweight.

Large scripts can lead to your site having slower loading times. Commonly, the different page speed tests, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights, flag Google Analytics as one of the elements that slow down a site.

By using Plausible Analytics, your site will keep loading fast and your visitors will have a smooth experience.

Get accurate data

Plausible Analytics takes several steps out of the box to elevate the accuracy of your stats:

• Known referrer spam domains and traffic originating from data centers is filtered out. We exclude ~32K data center IP ranges (i.e. a lot of bot IP addresses) by default, preventing bot traffic from inflating your stats. For eg., Cookiebot CMP users see a constant spike in their direct traffic because their sites are scanned constantly by the Cookiebot’s bots, requiring manual exclusions in GA4. There are other similar instances, but Plausible handles them all automatically for you.

• Traffic originating from Android apps (traditionally categorized as “Direct / None” in analytics tools) is uncovered. For sites with significant mobile traffic, this recovers 10% or more previously unattributed traffic from apps like Gmail, Slack and Telegram

• Visitors that use VPN services and the Tor browser are grouped under the “Anonymous VPN Service” entry to eliminate the noise that VPNs add to the locations reports

In addition to this, browsers such as Firefox block the most popular analytics tools and so do the different ad-blocking extensions. These are used by millions of web users who won’t be counted in your website statistics. It’s not uncommon to see 30% or even more of the audience on a website blocking Google Analytics.

Plausible Analytics is privacy-friendly by default, so it doesn’t see the same level of blockage. We also have a way for you to proxy our script as a first-party connection.

Try Plausible Analytics

Does all this sound good for your ecommerce or SaaS startup? You can try out Plausible Analytics on your website for free. We have a completely free 30-day trial. No credit card is required. You can start your free trial here.

We don’t make money by selling or sharing your visitor data or abusing your visitor’s privacy. This is why Plausible Analytics is not free as in beer. We choose the subscription business model rather than the business model of surveillance capitalism.

As we’re very lightweight, you can even run Plausible alongside your current analytics provider, test things and only remove the other script after being thrilled with what Plausible provides. Enjoy!