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It’s an interesting time to be an online business, catching up with rapidly shifting “trends” regarding AI, increasing concerns around consumer privacy, and the one you can’t miss: shifting SEO –– one of the most favourite channels of digital marketers for more than two decades.
Some people on LinkedIn and other niche communities claim how “SEO is dead” (trust me, that’s been a pretty common thrown-around phrase), others beg to differ and encourage to adapt.
Meanwhile AI is being adopted more and more all over the world, privacy-conscious users are increasing, and it can all feel overwhelming. We try to take an objective view at everything and provide answers to what SEO looks like in 2025, how to adapt, what are some things to take care of, and how to measure it all in Plausible.
- Is SEO dead in 2025?
- So, what to do?
- Analyzing organic search traffic
- Why use Plausible for SEO analysis?
Is SEO dead in 2025?
This is a good time to revisit what SEO even means. “Search Engine Optimization” is the method of optimizing whatever content you push on the web in a way that search engines like to present it (preferably on the first page of search results) to the people who search for related queries.
There are essentially two parts of this “optimization.” One is hunting keywords to understand what people are asking on search engines and if relevant to you, writing content to offer answers to those questions. Second is making the content presentable, easily readable, accessible, etc. (the on-page, off-page and technical SEO bit of it).
The second part is something that content makers should anyway do, i.e. provide a good reading experience. But what lies at the core of all of it is the first part. So let’s break that down by asking three questions:
Have people stopped asking questions on the web?
Not at all (have you?).
Is the place and the way everyone searches for answers on the web evolving?
Certainly. Think AI chatbots, privacy-first browsers, etc.
Has your overall organic traffic dropped?
Hmm, moment of truth. So, I decided to check ours at Plausible. I simply compared the last 12 months’ organic search traffic and it’s actually increased by 12%.
Last 3 months looked stable too. Since Google is the main organic search source that sends the most traffic and is generally equated with SEO, I just looked at traffic sent by Google searches, and the patterns are still similar for us.
If click-through rates from Google search result pages should have been dropping (because SEO is supposed to be dead and AI overviews are the new normal), it didn’t seem to affect us at least.
Not a good sample size but since we seem to be on the “safer” side, this meets our purpose of continuing the study on what is working if SEO is not.
So, traffic has been stable and growing from organic searches. Next, we look at the breakdown of organic sources. Apart from Google, it shows some sources like DuckDuckGo, Brave, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.
The pattern here is that there are privacy-focused search engines and AI chatbots showing up decently more than the previous years.
The conclusion is simple. Search Engine Optimization is not just about gaming the top search engine in the world anymore, but the ability to be discovered by all the other “replacements.” If I could, I would rename it to organic search optimization.
Yes, there are a few exceptions. Say, you are an ed-tech and compile math exercises as a content strategy, then AI could be taking away some traffic from you by engaging with students in real time, sharing math exercises according to the set difficulty level, helping with formulae, exam questions, etc. In such cases, you will most likely need to adapt the whole content or business strategy itself.
Or, if the nature of questions in an AI chat don’t need a referral link to be shared or a product to be recommended, you could lose out on some traditional traffic but I do think that the balance will be maintained because people need solutions at the end of the day and they will find your high-quality product/service through a method.
So, is SEO dead? Yes and no.
Yes: traditional SEO that only tries to game the system could be dead, or at least struggling. The difference is that search engines have gotten better (and continue to improve) in weeding out content that’s optimized for ranking and not for providing value.
No: If you’ve been providing valuable content. All the newer AI bots, search engines, etc. will find, recommend and cite your content on their own.
So if you’ve been making high-quality content answering real questions of your target audience and the nature of your business allows you to stay afloat, you should be good to go.
So, what to do?
Take care of technical SEO
Since the new age channels are good at discovering your content on their own, we need to make sure that our content is indeed “discoverable.” This would mean the following:
- Optimize crawling and indexing: Use robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and canonical tags to ensure search engines index the right pages.
- Improve site speed and Performance: Minify CSS/JS, enable caching, use a CDN, and optimize images for faster loading.
- Ensure mobile-friendliness & keep the Core Web Vitals in check.
- Enhance website security: Use SSL certificates, HSTS, and security updates to protect against vulnerabilities.
- Optimize internal linking and site architecture: Use a logical hierarchy, breadcrumbs, and internal links to improve navigation and SEO.
- Consider adding an llms.txt file
Optimize for all the “search engines”
As we just saw, organic discovery sources have been spread among newer types of platforms. Beyond Google, optimize your content for alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Bing, etc., if you can.
These platforms are gaining more traction due to increasing privacy concerns and evolving user behavior. You can start by ensuring your website is indexed properly on these search engines, testing how your content ranks there, and finding any newer search queries that might be there to answer.
AI traffic is real
Chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Deepseek, etc., have become discovery sources. These tools scrape the web for answers and provide direct responses to users. They:
- Suggest a product, leading to “Direct” traffic,
- Cite a source, leading to “Organic Search” traffic on the cited source, or
- Do a web search for you, show results, and answer your question by assimilating information from those sources. This would also lead to “Organic Search” traffic.
Interestingly, we saw a traffic surge of 2,200%+ in 2024 just from AI channels. The whole study along with ways to “AI-optimize” are here.
Speaking of which…it’s worthy to take a moment to observe how AI companions are being utilized now: as a personal note taker, movie recommender, finance manager, strategist helping with big business decisions, and whatnot.
This has raised concerns over vulnerability of personal and sensitive data, since AI gets access to the users’ routines, financial data, and other sensitive information. It’s speculated how this is going to inspire a lot of policies and regulations this year around the world, which brings me to the next point.
Run along with privacy
This is a bit wary of our main discussion about organic search traffic but since privacy as a factor is changing user behavior, I feel compelled to talk about it as an essential piece of the puzzle.
Your consumers care more and more about privacy. Becoming more customer oriented than algorithms oriented can be a key strategy. Consider these:
- Companies like Apple have used privacy as a competitive advantage by educating and protecting its users from being tracked by introducing features like Private Relay, app tracking protection, etc.
- Companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, WhatsApp, Tiktok, etc. have faced GDPR fines in millions of dollars within the last few recent years. In fact, Meta faced a fine of €1.2 billion in May 2023. All this for mishandling personal data.
- Third-party cookie tracking is coming to a demise, which we covered here.
- Increasing use of VPNs, ad blockers, and private browsing tools. Another study we did here that revealed 58% of tech-savvy audiences use such methods.
- There is a shift towards self-hosted and decentralized services as users move away from centralized Big Tech platforms.
- Younger generations are increasingly aware of data rights and privacy risks.
- If you run a quick Reddit search, you’ll notice communities of privacy anxious individuals with a combined total of 1.7M members.
If this is not enough, know that 120 countries have established privacy and security regulations just like the GDPR to protect their peoples’ data privacy.
It’s much easier to build a privacy-friendly tech stack for your business rather than navigating all those regulations with costly legal aid.
Respecting and proactively protecting your customers’ privacy can very realistically emerge as a brand differentiator, and hence, help your overall traffic and business.
Analyzing organic search traffic
Let’s get to the measuring organic search (the “new SEO”) part of the equation. Here’s everything you want to be able to do:
- See all organic search traffic together, while seeing a breakdown of specific sources like Google search traffic, Perplexity traffic, and so on.
- Understand which content is effective in driving such organic traffic
- Understand which search terms drive traffic the most
- Engagement metrics like time on page, bounce rate, scroll depth, etc.
- Assess how well organic traffic contributes to conversions like sign-ups, purchases, form submissions, etc.
All of this is possible to do with Plausible. If you have been in SEO even for a bit, you’ll know how tough it can get to analyze your traffic in Google Analytics which is the traditional choice.
For all the research work (keyword analysis, competitive analysis, etc.), we suggest you use the specialized SEO tools. But analyzing such traffic on your website needs a web analytics tool. All of this can be done with Plausible.
You can play around with our live demo, if you don’t have a Plausible account.
See overall organic search traffic
We have a pre-built “Top Channels” report in the dashboard which automatically consolidates relevant traffic sources into their respective channel types such as Direct, organic search, organic social, etc.
This makes it super convenient to see all organic traffic together rather than piecing different traffic sources together from different reports, or relying on custom reporting.
When you click on the organic search entry (like shown in the case study above), your dashboard filters by it to only show data relevant to organic search, and you get to see a “Top Sources” report with a breakdown of these organic search channels.
This is an expandable report that shows the sources by visitors, bounce rate, and visit duration, which you can sort by as well. You can click on any of such sources to filter further. Take a look here.
Assess effective content
In the filtered dashboard, you can use the Entry Pages report to see which pages attract the most organic search visitors. This is also an expandable report with metrics you can use to sort your landing pages by.
You can click on any row to further filter the dashboard and study that landing page: its bounce rate, geographies it was visited from, goal conversions in the sessions acquired through this page, etc.
Assess effective keywords
You can break down your Google search traffic further by integrating your Google Search Console account with Plausible. You’ll be able to see the search terms that got you traffic from Google directly in the Plausible dashboard.
Compare the queries driving traffic with the Entry Pages report to see which content aligns with search intent. Over time, you can monitor which keywords gain traction and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Correlate conversions and other things
That’s it. Now you can also see your goal conversions (learn how to set them up here) in this filtered dashboard. You can also see the used devices, operating systems, popular locations, etc.
You can use a mix and match of filters to create your segments and analyze organic traffic further. For eg. I can apply the following four filters to assess how many people signed up for our free trial from organic searches, landing on the homepage, in England.
You can check out this exact segmented dashboard here.
Why use Plausible for SEO analysis?
Plausible is an open-source, simpler, and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics.
- Everything is in one place. Unlike traditional tools like Google Analytics, where you need multiple reports or custom explorations, we keep it simple with a single-page dashboard. In fact, it’s easier to track visits, exit pages, conversions analysis, and a lot of things in Plausible than GA4.
- Our stats are very accurate as we take special measures in ensuring so. This is another differentiator from most analytics tools.
- We don’t rely on cookies or invasive tracking, ensuring privacy-friendly analytics and out-of-the-box compliance with GDPR, and similar laws around the world.
P.S. Now you can even make your own SEO dashboard that suits your needs the best in Looker Studio using our brand new connector. I’m thinking of making one as a template for SEO professionals, should I?
Different businesses or teams have unique goals, workflows, and preferences for tracking and visualizing their data. For marketers and marketing agencies, creating custom dashboards is crucial to help clients visualize and understand their data. One powerful tool for this purpose is Looker Studio by Google.
This beginner’s guide provides a detailed exploration of Looker Studio, covering everything from basic visualizations to advanced techniques like data blending and calculated fields.
Additionally, we’re excited to introduce our all-new Plausible Analytics Looker Studio Connector, now live in beta, which simplifies integrating Plausible data into Looker Studio for more flexible and powerful reporting.
Using the example of replicating a Plausible Analytics dashboard, we’ll introduce you to Looker Studio’s capabilities while showcasing how to create sophisticated, custom reports.
We’ll introduce you to what Looker Studio is, its capabilities, and how to utilize it by taking the example of replicating a Plausible Analytics dashboard in Looker Studio.
- What is Looker Studio?
- How to use Looker Studio?
- Plausible Analytics connector for Looker Studio
- Creating a simple report in Looker Studio
- Advanced uses of Looker Studio
- Try it for yourself!
What is Looker Studio?
Looker Studio is what was previously known as Google Data Studio. It is a data visualization tool designed with the intent of helping you create custom reports and simplify their interpretation through visualizations that you or your clients prefer.
It allows you to bring data from multiple sources into one place, transforming complex information into clear, easy-to-digest reports. This helps you get actionable and valuable insights from raw data.
Looker Studio is free of cost to use, as a self-service business intelligence tool. However, the Looker Studio Pro is also an option.
In a nutshell, you can do the following with Looker Studio:
- Use visuals like tables, pie charts, bar graphs, etc.
- Select the specific data and custom metrics you want to showcase.
- Customize fonts, colors, and overall design. Or even do something like incorporating your client’s logo for personalization.
- Share reports with others, giving them permission to either view or edit the reports based on your preferences.
The Looker Studio is not only limited to Google’s tools like Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Google Sheets, etc., but also connects with various third-party tools that connect data and analytics that are useful to businesses. It could be a CRM, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, product analytics, etc.
The reports can be dynamic, meaning they automatically update whenever the original data source changes, ensuring your reports automatically reflect the most current information.
How to use Looker Studio?
If you’re new to the Looker Studio, you can start by creating an account here. The dashboard offers a variety of templates, from simple data overviews to detailed analyses.
You can choose a template based on your needs and/or the audience of these visualizations. For eg., if you are a digital marketing team, you can look at the templates showcasing key KPIs like conversion rates, impressions by channel, and audience engagement.
But the more important part is choosing a data connector. This basically means which tool you want Looker Studio to source its data from, so that you can create custom reports from it.
As a crash course on how to use Looker Studio, we will take the example of our own connector.
Plausible Analytics connector for Looker Studio
Plausible Analytics is a simpler, privacy-friendly, and more accurate alternative to Google Analytics, that now comes with the official Plausible Analytics Looker Studio Connector.
This helps you add some sophisticated and powerful reporting features that help turn Plausible into an even better replacement for Google Analytics.
It allows you to link your Plausible data with Looker Studio and integrate it with all your other data sources to produce custom and flexible reports in seconds. See our documentation on how to start using the Plausible Looker Studio connector.
Creating a simple report in Looker Studio
To create our first report in Looker Studio, we will create a simple replica of the default Plausible Analytics dashboard. This will give us a feel for what fields are available in the Looker Studio connector and how we can begin to create our own custom data visualizations.
You can explore this simple report template that we’ve created in Looker Studio which you can use to start building your own custom reports.
First, a brief overview of how Looker Studio works. On the right hand side, you will see a toolbar that gives you options of the different fields available while above that, you can see the different visualization options.
When you insert a visualization such as a time series chart, you will have the option to add fields as “Dimensions”, “Metrics” or “Filters”. You can also specify how you want the data sorted and apply some custom styling.
Let’s see this in action by recreating the top graph in the Plausible Analytics dashboard, which looks like this.
Time Series graph
The most prominent part of the dashboard is the line chart that displays the number of “Unique Visitors” over time. In order to recreate this, we will select a “Time Series Chart” from the right-hand toolbar or you can do the same from the top menu under “Insert”.
Then, we will simply need to select “Date” as our dimension and “Visitors” as our metric.
Depending on what time range you want to use your chart for, you can set things up differently in Looker Studio. If you want to see daily or weekly numbers, you should use the “Date” dimension. For weekly, you can change the way that Looker Studio reads the “Date” field by clicking on the calendar icon and changing “Data Type” to “Date & Time > ISO Year Week”.
If you want to see annual or monthly data, you could either have Looker Studio do it for you by changing “Data Type” to “Date & Time > Year or Year Month”, or you could select “Year or Year Month” as your dimension instead of “Date” (both ways work the same).
Finally, if you want to see hourly data, you should use the “Time” dimension. Once we’ve configured our fields, we should have something that looks like this.
Scorecards
Going back to the Plausible dashboard as our guide, next we want to add the individual metrics across the top. In Looker Studio, these are called “Scorecards”. Let’s add one by going to “Insert” and choosing “Scorecard”.
The configuration for a scorecard is simple, you just need to pick the dimension that you want to highlight. Let’s start with “Visitors”, then we can simply copy and paste the scorecard and update the metric for visits, pageviews, views per visit, bounce rate and visit duration.
In order to add the comparison to the prior period, we can select “Comparison Date Range” and choose “Previous Period”. This tells Looker Studio to automatically calculate the change based on the date range you have selected so if you’re looking at the last 30 days, it will take data from the 30 days before that and tell you what the difference is.
Once we’ve set up all of our scorecards, we have something like this.
Date range
Speaking of date ranges, this is a good time to add one to our report. To do this, you simply go to “Insert”, choose “Date Range Control” and click anywhere on your report.
This will give you a dropdown menu that enables you to select the date range you want to view for your entire report. When you change this date range, any comparisons that you’ve enabled (like our scorecard) will automatically update as well.
Tables
Then we can move down our Plausible Analytics dashboard and recreate some of the tables you will find there. Tables in Looker Studio are one of the most versatile ways you can use your data as you can add several dimensions at once and export to CSV or Google Sheets.
For our purposes, we will look at the “Countries” and “Devices” section of the Plausible dashboard as these particularly show the strength of Looker Studio. In order to recreate the list of countries, we simply need to select “Insert”, choose “Table” and then choose “Country Name as our “Dimension” and “Visitors” as our metric.
But then if we want to add “Region” and “City”, we can actually just add those directly to the same table by adding those as new dimensions.
So now we have a table that gives us the granular level detail of each country, region and city combination, something that you would have to click on each item individually in the Plausible dashboard.
You can see this as well with the “Devices” table. By selecting “Device”, “Browser” and “OS” as dimensions, you can see the stats for each individual combination.
Filters
Finally, let’s add some filters to our data. Looker Studio offers simple and advanced filtering and for now we’ll stick to the basics. To add a simple drop-down menu that will enable you to filter by different dimensions, you can go to “Insert” and choose “Dimension Control”.
Then you simply need to select what dimension you want the drop-down to use. For our example, let’s add one that corresponds to the Plausible dashboard: “Source”.
Once you add this, you will see that if you click it, you will see all the sources that referred traffic to your site. By selecting one or many, we will filter our report accordingly.
Considerations
Creating your own customized reports gives you the power to use your Plausible Analytics data in new and interesting ways but it also means that you will be exposed to some of the limitations of how different data fields can or cannot be combined.
For example, some dimensions are based on events (every action that takes place on your site) while others are based on visits (sessions that take place on your site). Depending on which category a dimension falls into, different metrics will be available. In general, page, hostname and goal are event dimensions while all others are session dimensions.
Bounce rate, visits and visit duration can only be used in combination with session dimensions, while events can only be used with event dimensions. In the case that you use an invalid combination of dimensions and metrics, you will either see null values for the invalid metric or you will see an error in Looker Studio.
Goals and custom properties are a special case as they have the additional conversion rate metric that can only be used when one of these fields is either added as a dimension or used in a filter. In order to get the number of unique conversions, you should use the visitors metric and in order to get total conversions you should use the events metric.
So to create the table in the Plausible dashboard that shows unique conversions, total conversions and conversion rate by goal, you would have a table that looks like this in Looker Studio.
Advanced uses of Looker Studio
Plausible Analytics Looker Studio connector proves even more useful when you are using it for advanced applications that cannot be replicated in the Plausible dashboard.
Here we will cover a few examples of different advanced uses. You can also see our advanced Looker Studio template.
Combining elements
One of the effects that is featured in the advanced dashboard is to have a scorecard that has a chart line background giving you the ability to quickly grasp the trend of the metric you are displaying.
You can accomplish this effect by layering two Looker Studio components one on top of the other. In this case, we have a “Timeseries Chart” and a “Scorecard”, with both using the same metric: “Visitors”.
In Looker Studio, you can control the order that objects are displayed by right-clicking on an element and selecting “Order”. You will then have the option to send an element up or down relative to other elements in your report.
In our case, we have set our scorecard to be the same height and width as our chart but we have then set the order of the chart so it is below the scorecard. Finally, we just need to set the background color of the scorecard so it is transparent enough for the chart to show through. You can do this by going to “Style” and choose “Background and Border” and choose “Background.”
Custom groups
The next element on the advanced dashboard is a stacked line chart that uses a custom grouping of data to show the split of direct vs. non-direct traffic.
To achieve this breakdown we will be using the “Stacked Area Chart” visualization and we will be selecting “Date” as the dimension and “Visitors” as the metric. Then under “Breakdown Dimension”, we will need to select “Add Metric” and choose “Add Group”.
This will open up a screen where you can configure a new custom “Data Group”. In our example, we want to use the dimension “Channel”. By default, this field will indicate what channel a visitor used to visit the website including direct as well as organic search, email, organic social and others. We can configure our own groups that are direct and non-direct, by specifying that the direct group should exactly match the value direct while anything that doesn’t match will be grouped as non-direct.
Once we have done that, we can now use our direct traffic group in our chart as our breakdown dimension.
Calculated field
One element that we didn’t fully recreate in the basic Looker Studio dashboard that is present in the Plausible dashboard is the table that shows the percentage breakdown of traffic by country. Previously, for simplicity, we stopped at total numbers of visitors without showing the percentage.
The reason for this omission is that displaying the percentages requires that we use a calculated field. To do this, we click on our table and go to “Setup” and under “Metric”, we can select “Add Metric” and choose “Add Calculated Field”.
This opens up a screen where you can create your own custom calculated fields based on the data that is already available in the report. In our case, we want to create a new metric called “%” that simply returns the visitors metric in a new format.
We will select “Percent” under “Data Type” and “Percent of total” under “Comparison calculation”. This tells Looker Studio that we want our new metric to calculate the percentage of the total for each row in our table.
Once configured, we can now see the percentages in our country / regions / cities table.
Advanced filters
Previously, we looked at simple Looker Studio filters that can be accomplished by adding drop-downs to the report. Looker Studio also allows for more advanced filtering that can be done at the level of individual elements.
To demonstrate, we will build a stacked bar chart that shows two specific goals over time: ‘visit /register’ and ‘Sign up for a trial’. This would be a useful view to look at to track the performance of a specific register page over time in terms of sign ups. Note that these two specific goals are related to our own Plausible dashboard and you’ll need to use goals that you’ve set up on your site.
To start off, we will insert a “Stacked Column Chart” and we will select the “Date” as the dimension, “Goal Name” as the breakdown dimension and “Visitors” as the metric. Remember that when dealing with goals, the visitors metric gives the number of unique conversions.
But now we have a chart that has all of our goals rather than the two that we are interested in so we need to add a specific filter to the chart. We can do this by going to “Chart”, select “Setup”, then “Filter” and finally “Add a Filter”.
This brings up a screen that enables us to configure our advanced filter. We will select “Goal Name” as our dimension and we will select “Include” as we are selecting the conditions to include data. Exclude can be used if we wanted to filter out these two goals instead. Then we will select “In” which enables us to list the goal names that we want to filter for.
For other situations, Looker Studio offers the ability to check for equals, contains, starts with as well as Regex matching.
Data blending
Now that we have a chart that shows the performance of our goals over time we might want to calculate the % relationship of one goal to the other to see what percentage of visitors completes this stage of our conversion funnel. In our example case, we might want to know the conversion rate by day of our registration page, in other words, what is the number of sign-ups divided by the number of visits to the register page.
You might think that we could simply create a calculated metric like before where we take a percentage of the total but unfortunately in this case Looker Studio will give you the percentage out of all of the goal conversions rather than just the two goals that we want to see.
As a result, we need to blend our data in Looker Studio. This enables you to create custom data views by joining data together based on fields, filters and join conditions that you specify.
Let’s look at how it works in more detail. First, you go to “Resource”, select “Manage blends” and click on “Add a blend”. Then we need to configure the blend based on the fields that we are interested in and specify how we want to join the data together which in our case will look like this.
In the left table we want date for dimensions and visitors as the metric. Then we need to add a filter that matches goal name equal to “Signs up for a trial”. This will be the numerator for our calculation as it will give us visitors that signed up for a trial by date.
Now we need to configure the right table to give us our denominator. For this we will configure everything the same except we will change our filter to equal “visit /register”. This way we will now have our visitors that visited the register page.
It is helpful to rename the metrics on each side so you don’t mix them up. We will call the left-hand metric “Sign Ups” and the right-hand metric “Visit Register”.
Finally we need to configure the join condition. We will select “Right Outer” and we will join on date which means that there might be some dates that have “visit /register” but no conversions and these days should still be included.
Now that we have our data blend ready, we just need to select this blend as the data source for a table. Then we can select date as our dimension and “Sign Ups” and “Visit Register” as our metrics. Finally, we can create a calculated metric that divides sign ups by visit register.
With that calculated field, we now have our table that shows the conversions by date as well as the conversion rate for that specific step in our customer journey.
Advanced formatting
Finally let’s see some more advanced ways you can format elements in Looker Studio by looking at the bottom section of the advanced template. First, we’ve created a horizontal bar chart that shows the channel breakdown of visitors to different entry pages on our blog.
To create this, we’ve simply set “Entry Page” as our dimension, “Channel” as our breakdown dimension and “Visitors” as our metric. Then we’ve added a filter for “Entry Page” contains “blog.
This gives us an interesting but unwieldy chart with too many rows and colors to properly comprehend. In order to make the chart more useful we can do two things. First, we will limit the number of rows to 25 by going to “Chart”, select “Style” and setting “Bars” to 25.
Then we will go to “Chart”, choose “Styles”, then “Series”, set the number to 4 and check “Group Others”. This means that the number of channels shown as stacked bars will be capped at 3 and all the others will be grouped into a fourth other category.
With these style settings, we’ve now created a concise chart that gives us a quick view of our top 25 blog posts and where the main sources of traffic are coming from.
Finally underneath this chart we have a table that is set up to conditionally format a row based on whether or not it makes up 80% of the blog traffic. This way we could do an 80 / 20 analysis and see which blog posts are the most important in terms of driving new traffic.
To do this, we create a table with entry page as the dimension and visitors as the metric. Then we need to create a calculated metric that keeps a running total of the visitors percentage. We can do this by selecting “Percent of Total Relative to Corresponding Data” under “Comparison Calculation” and “Running Sum” under “Running Calculation”.
Then we just need to use this to style our table by going to “Chart”, then “Styles”, “Conditional Formatting” and finally “Add. This will bring up a screen that will allow us to configure our “Conditional Formatting Rule”.
Here we will select our total % calculated field and specify that anything “Less Than” 0.8 should be highlighted. With this, we will have a nicely highlighted table with all blog posts that make up the top 80% of traffic highlighted.
Try it for yourself!
I hope this post was a good introduction to Google Looker Studio. If you’re looking for an easy to use, open source, lightweight and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics with an official Google Looker Studio connector, do explore Plausible Analytics. All the best!
In 2024, the Plausible website saw a ~2,200% increase in referral traffic from four AI search engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Phind (refer to the screenshot above). These numbers were in the 100’s in 2023.
AI has officially taken over the way we search for things on our minds and get answers. Earlier, the AI models used to have a knowledge cutoff date with no internet access and had limited use cases. Eventually, the information became more up-to-date and transformed the way AI chats were used.
Similarly, AI has started citing its sources now and started sending traffic to websites. Many businesses and individuals are curious about how they can start appearing or being mentioned more in the answers given by AI – a so-called “AI optimization” or “AI search optimization.”
The need seems to be somewhat more urgent given the lower click through rates to websites from Google SERPs because of Google AI overviews. Gartner says search engine use will drop by about 25% by 2026, because of AI chatbots and other virtual assistants.
Coming back to our traffic surge from AI channels, we did not exactly apply any “AI search optimization” techniques but something seems to have worked well for us. We will analyze this traffic in the Plausible dashboard to figure out what that is.
While we are at it, we did figure out some AI optimization “techniques” that are worth noting. Let’s go.
- Analyzing Plausible’s AI search traffic boost in 2024
- What can you really do?
- Conclusion
Analyzing Plausible’s AI search traffic boost in 2024
AI traffic can be isolated using the Top Sources report (click on any source to filter the dashboard by it) or by straight away using the Filter button on the dashboard. We used the AI search engines we could identify from our list of Referrer URLs in the Filter modal:
Figuring out where AI chats mention Plausible and send traffic
We have a pre-made Entry Pages report in Plausible. After filtering the dashboard with only AI traffic, we looked at this report to figure out where such people entered our site from.
This would directly correlate with what subject was being discussed in those AI chats before the visitor came to Plausible. Here’s the screenshot of our top entry pages from AI channels:
The clear winner is our homepage and from our SEO data, support chats, and social media mentions –– we know that Plausible is usually mentioned in the discussions related to these topics:
- Privacy-friendly analytics,
- GDPR compliance and no need for cookie consent banners
- Open-source
- Self-hosted
- Our data processing methods
- Simpler alternative to Google Analytics
- Lightweight script
So, is it possible that if we chatted with an AI bot about any of such topics, it will mention and/or cite Plausible? We can confirm that first-hand.
Another thing before trying that, that also hints towards the legibility of this hypothesis is the entry pages listed second, third, and so on, after the homepage.
These ones also talk about the topics for which Plausible is usually referred: GDPR compliance, self-hosted analytics, open-source, our data policy, cookie consent banners, and so on. So the hypothesis is matching so far.
Let’s confirm it by asking ChatGPT and Perplexity––our two topmost performing AI channels––with the laziest prompt ever (because niche prompts would do well anyway):
^ That’s ChatGPT sending traffic to the second topmost mentioned entry page, i.e. /blog/legal-assessment-gdpr-eprivacy.
P.S. I used the “Search the web” option along with the prompt to ensure ChatGPT returned some links from Bing (Bing is the search engine used by ChatGPT). If you use a regular prompt, you may or may not get citations.
Another thing ChatGPT did while sending this specific traffic was add a UTM source automatically to it. This is what I got after clicking the link suggested above: “https://plausible.io/blog/legal-assessment-gdpr-eprivacy?utm_source=chatgpt.com
By the way, these UTM sources are also visible in the UTM reports in Plausible, making it even further easier to track traffic back to its originating source.
Let’s try the same exercise with Perplexity AI. It returned the same citation to the same blog post as above.
Isn’t there a better way to track my brand’s visibility across AI search tools?
Other than manually confirming hypotheses, a more sophisticated method would have been somehow monitoring AI conversation trends. We need data for that directly from AI search engines.
But unlike publicly available search engine results, AI chats are personal and not publicly available to assess.
There are some Enterprise-focused companies offering AI brand visibility services where a lot of manual work is anyway put in to determine which conversations the brand is mentioned by AI and how that compares against their competitors.
Hence, when analyzing your AI traffic in your web analytics tool, some manual work would be required at this stage (as of Dec 2024).
Was this “qualified” traffic?
Qualified traffic is high quality traffic, i.e. people who would be genuinely interested in the things your business, or at least website, offers. Any other traffic is not useful for meeting business goals.
To figure out if the traffic we were getting from AI channels was qualified or not, we saw two things:
- What did they do on the site?
- Were any conversions met from this?
What did they do on the site?
For this, we can simply look at the “Top Pages” report. This is an overview of the top pages visited in the sessions coming from AI channels. So it is a good indicator of what was happening in those sessions: an insight not completely offered by the Entry pages report.
Here’s the screenshot of our site’s top pages visited in the sessions acquired from AI channels:
This indicates that after the homepage (which was by the way, scrolled 58% of the page length indicating that many visitors read most of the important info we like to offer on our homepage), the second-most visited page was the free trial registration page!
That is great news, since we know that the journey taken by these folks, that started from searching about a relevant topic on AI tools, included visiting our registration page too. So far so good!
But did actual conversions occur? We don’t have to guess because we have a goal for that. We will look at this info in the next section. Before that, we can quickly look at the other top performing pages in AI-acquired sessions.
These consist of our live stats page (which we also utilize as a product demo), activating an account, adding sites to Plausible, visiting our documentation, and other pages we have about the topics for which Plausible is popular (as listed in the Entry pages section above).
That is very good qualified traffic, in my opinion!
Were any conversions met from this?
Exactly these goals were met in AI-acquired sessions:
If we look at one of the funnels, we also know how many people entered the sign up flow and completed it:
P.S. All of this info is openly available in our live demo as well.
When?
If you notice the top graph, there’s been a spike in AI-acquired traffic from mid-August and has maintained those traffic levels ever since. Hmm, what could have happened at that time?
A little digging revealed that ChatGPT had a stable release on August 8. This could be it!
So what? The only conclusion from this is that not much was needed to be done from our side to get “AI-featured”. Since AI models are in heavy development and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, they will continue looking for good information on the web and keep getting better at it.
So if we focus on creating valuable content –– AI will hopefully proactively pick it up at some point. This arguably depends on other factors like brand authority as well, but that’s for a deeper discussion later in this article.
How do we approach content and marketing at Plausible that may have helped with this AI traffic boost?
At the core of everything is a thoughtful product, built over the years that continues to improve with customer feedback. We like to focus on real problems and real people. This is why we get organically featured in social media, search engines, and communities.
Whenever we decide on a new topic to write about, we like to understand what the ideal reader might be seeking from it. This helps us understand the intent behind the topic and helps us match it. Intent matching triumphs keyword matching for us.
This aligns with Google’s regular “helpful content updates” as well, which regularly penalizes websites for trying to hack the algorithm. This confirms that only useful content that understands the problem and offers real solutions will do well in the long run and not necessarily the one being optimized for searches.
Since AI tools pick their knowledge from search engines, it’s quite obvious that if a search engine likes you (high brand authority) –– you are more likely to be noticed by AI as well.
What can you really do?
Let’s look at the things that can practically be done to ensure best chances of being featured by AI in its answers.
Identify your low hanging fruits
Figure out what you are already being mentioned for, if at all. You can use the web analytics tool of your choice for this purpose and do some hypothesis and reverse-engineering like we did above.
This gives you a good starting point to see what works well for you and why. From there, you can improve what’s already working and gradually explore related topics. Over time, this will help you get recognized for a wider range of topics in your industry.
Focus on those AI channels that cite the most.
For instance, Perplexity AI’s USP since the beginning was to always cite its sources. And where does Perplexity get its information from?
It’s Microsoft Bing! And so does ChatGPT.
So you can shift your focus from not just trying to rank well in Google but Bing as well.
And of course, there are the Google AI overviews that use citations too. While they may not always lead to clicks, that’s no reason to stop creating helpful content for your audience or striving to get cited.
So yes, SEO is still your best bet in many ways. Speaking of which:
Get better at SEO – but the way Google looks at it
This isn’t an isolated advice but if you want to optimize for Google AI overviews, you need to:
- Create high-quality, authoritative content directly addressing user intent.
- Optimize for top organic rankings with strong click-through rates (CTR).
- Regularly update content to maintain freshness and relevance.
- Address related queries to broaden coverage for AI Overviews.
- Incorporate multimedia like videos for diverse content formats.
- Align with EEAT principles: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
There’s someone who looked at Google AI overview’s patent and therefore it is more than safe to say that above practices should help.
Another experiment would be to try out different content formats since Google AI overviews fetch their answers from different types of content formats like text, images, videos, etc.
We also have a study on how SEO is evolving, that can help you navigate it better.
Consider adding an llms.txt file
Have you ever used a robots.txt file for your site? It’s used by websites to give instructions to web crawlers/spiders/bots about which pages or sections of the site they are allowed to crawl and index.
It is a plain text file that is placed at the root of a website and contains directives that guide web crawlers on how to interact with the website’s content.
Now, “llms.txt” files are making an appearance. According to the proposal:
We propose that those interested in providing LLM-friendly content add a /llms.txt file to their site. This is a markdown file that provides brief background information and guidance, along with links to markdown files (which can also link to external sites) providing more detailed information. This can be used, for instance, in order to provide information necessary for coders to use a library, or as part of research to learn about a person or organization and so forth. You are free to use the llms.txt logo on your site to indicate your support if you wish.
Even though there’s nothing official about this, if you notice the list of projects already using an llms.txt file in this library, you will notice that Anthropic itself uses it too. And who is Anthropic? It’s the creator of Claude AI. So there must be some merit in this optimization.
Thank us later.
Write content for citation and reference purposes
If this is relevant for your industry, it will help to create citation-worthy content. Usually what gets cited, in ChatGPT for example, is this:
Please do note that this doesn’t always apply to situations when ChatGPT users use the “search the web” functionality while prompting. This is because this feature refers to real-time results fetched from the web anyway.
Cover topics well
Don’t stop at an isolated content piece but address related questions and cover the subject in-depth because AI chat tools allow follow-up queries.
Optimize for natural language and voice search
This has been a growing SEO technique as well but makes a lot of sense for “AI optimization.” Why? Because voice search is becoming a key way people find information.
Try to match natural, conversational language rather than traditional typing patterns. People tend to phrase their queries in a more conversational tone when using voice search.
Conclusion
AI can help multiply your brand’s visibility. Just get going with relevant and qualitative content, and start tracking AI-referred traffic in an analytics tool. All the best!
The Google Analytics 4 interface has multiple reports, beneath multiple layers of menus. Some reports are standard, i.e. pre-made and available by default, while others are custom (“Explorations”) that you need to create on your own from scratch.
Amongst these maze of reports, insights are hidden. Site owners, especially businesses, need a bunch of insights and have some questions about their website’s performance that should be fairly straightforward to get.
But fetching most of such insights from GA4 requires going through multiple different standard reports while editing them, using Explorations to build custom tables from scratch, or using a combination of both depending upon the use case––all this while still dealing with inaccurate numbers.
And it is not usually as simple as going through a how-to guide and creating and accessing the right reports, but usually needs users to go through full GA4 and GTM (Google Tag Manager) courses, learning the right terminologies, how they are interconnected, setting the right things up, debugging, etc.
We created Plausible with simplicity in mind, so you wouldn’t have to worry about any of that. You get a one-page report with all the important insights (not less). Which are those and how are they found in Google Analytics 4 vs Plausible?
Helpful tip: You can open our live dashboard in another tab now as we keep referencing it throughout. You can also open the official GA4 Merch Shop demo property in a third tab to make the comparisons easier.
- Quick revision: Standard vs Custom reports in Google Analytics 4
- Finding insights in GA4 vs Plausible
- Other reasons Plausible is a superior web analytics choice
Quick revision: Standard vs Custom reports in Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics is mainly divided into two types of reports: standard reports and custom reports, aka Explorations. All the pre-built reports that are available under the “Reports” sidebar in GA4 are the standard ones.
If you go to “Explore” from the sidebar, you can create custom reports (known as Explorations) with the data that has been collected for your site and visualize them in different forms like table, funnel, tree graph, venn diagram, etc.
Finding insights in GA4 vs Plausible
How many people visit my site and how well they engage?
In Plausible
In the Plausible dashboard, the metrics that a site owner immediately wants to know are in the top bar: unique visitors, total visits, total pageviews, views per visit, bounce rate, and visit duration along with improvements/declines in those numbers for the selected time period.
Needless to say, it’s a complicated bunch of things to do in Explorations. And it could provide good advanced use cases for very large teams or agencies. But the problem is that some insights are fairly standard and essential to know for site owners but you still need to make use of Explorations –– complicating simple processes.
In case you want to confirm what these metrics mean, you can have a look at the definitions here.
In GA4
These metrics are found in different reports under different groups on the sidebar. It depends on what groups you see based on business objectives you select while signing up on GA4. But the individual standard reports are named the same.
The aforementioned metrics are also available as metrics in GA 4 which can essentially be added to any standard or custom report using the edit report feature. FYI: Metrics are numerical parameters that measure the performance of something.
But if you want to know where these insights are typically housed (based on the GA4 structure) when you open your GA dashboard, you will need to open different reports as explained below.
Unique visitors: Are known as “users” in GA4 and this metric is available in the User Acquisition report.
Quick context: Why “user acquisition”? This is because GA4 profiles users and tries to separate unique users from total sessions, with the help of cookies. Plausible, though, is privacy-friendly and only counts aggregated stats in terms of sessions and never tracks individual users.
Total visits: Are known as “sessions” in GA4 and this metric is available in the Traffic Acquisition report.
Total pageviews: This metric is available in the Pages and Screens report.
Views per visit: This metric is also available in the Pages and Screens report but not by default. It needs to be manually added using the report edit button.
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is also available as a metric which needs to be manually added to any of the reports you are viewing. It is not available by default and there’s no one-stop place to view it.
Time on Page: This is not available. But you can find the Average Engagement Time per User and Average Engagement Time per Session metrics to be added to any report. You may also find these in the Engagement Overview report.
P.S. While editing any standard report to add such metrics, don’t forget to “Save” them. It will avoid the trouble of adding the metric again and again.
The pages from where people leave my site?
Exit reports show where users leave your site. This can help you spot problems, like ineffective content or confusing pages. Although not all exits are bad—like when someone leaves after finishing a purchase. And that is exactly the insight we need.
In Plausible
You will find a straightforward, easily accessible “Exit Pages” report with metrics like:
- Visitors: Unique visitors exiting the site from that page
- Total exits: The number of exits made from that page
- Exit rate: The number of exits divided by the number of total pageviews for that specific page.
In GA4
In Google Analytics 4, an Exit pages report is not available. Your GA script does collect the “Exits” metric but it is not available in standard reports but only in Explorations.
Here are the steps recommended from GA4 experts:
- Go to Explore in GA4’s left sidebar.
- Create a new Blank or Free form report.
- Add the Page path and screen name dimension (or alternatives like Page Path + query string).
- Import the Exits metric by clicking the Plus icon in the Metrics section.
- Add dimensions and metrics to the exploration by double-clicking.
- Sort by Exits to identify the top exit pages.
Also, if you use the Looker Studio, then the Exits metric is not available therein.
How many conversions were acquired from which source, page, city, device, etc.?
Conversions are known as Goals in Plausible and Key Events in Google Analytics 4.
In Plausible
You can scroll down to the “Goal Conversions” section of your dashboard. Here you will find the list of goals converted for the selected period, along with their Click Rate, Visits and Revenue too if you’ve enabled revenue tracking.
Clicking on any of these goals will filter your dashboard. This makes finding the essential associated information for each event/goal extremely straightforward. You can also include additional filters like Country, Channels, Pages, etc., to get more granular information.
Learn more here.
In GA4
GA4 lets you collect various events and mark some as key events. Note that that in itself is a cumbersome process.
You get a standard Events report, which includes both events and key events. Here, you can add secondary dimensions, like Country, Device, etc. Key events data is also available in the Traffic and User acquisition reports, and Monetization reports if enabled.
The problem is that you can’t view all the info in one go, like available in Plausible. To get a report like that, you will again need to go to Explorations and build it all from scratch. How to do that would depend on the dimensions and metrics you want to view for the associated key events.
Segmentation of audiences
In Plausible
In Plausible, your audience data is already presented in useful reports like channels of acquisition, pages they visit, the locations they come from, and the devices they use. Clicking on any entry (or entries) filters the dashboard to show only the data pertaining to those filters –– creating segments.
For eg. If we want to study Plausible site’s UK visitors who upgraded to a paid subscription, in the year so far, we can simply use the following filters and make ourselves a segment. This hardly takes a few seconds and no learning curve.
You can see more about what audience segmentation is and how to do it in Plausible here.
In GA4
Segments can only be studied in Exploration reports. First you need to create a custom segment by going to Admin -> Data Display -> Segments. Or, you could do the same while adding a segment in an Exploration.
Also, Audiences cannot be directly used in explorations. However, you can create audiences using segments derived from explorations.
Similarly, comparisons are not directly usable in explorations. However, by clicking the Explore button in the comparison’s sidebar navigation, those comparisons will be converted into segments for use in that specific exploration.
Here’s how to study a segment in GA4:
- Go to Explore in the Google Analytics 4 menu.
- Click + Create New Exploration and select Blank.
- In the left panel, click + New Segment under “Segments.”
- Choose User Segment, set your conditions, and save.
- Drag the segment into the Segment Comparison area.
- Add relevant dimensions (e.g., Age, Country) and metrics (e.g., Sessions) to the workspace.
What’s happening on the website in real-time?
In Plausible
Simply select “Realtime” from the time period filter or press R on your keyboard. You can even select any other entry (like an acquisition channel, a page, a goal, etc.) to filter real time traffic further and make important decisions in real time.
This is especially useful in making real-time decisions, for instance on high volume, high spend media buying campaigns. Check out our real time dashboard here.
P.S. We also always display the number of current visitors on your site at the top even when a different time filter is selected.
In GA4
This is a hugely misleading report in GA4 as per several complaints.
The real time data is available as two different reports: “Realtime overview” and “Realtime pages.” The Realtime overview can be quite confusing with multiple cards and different terminologies as you can see below:
But it wouldn’t matter because the data you see here is most likely wrong. Google Analytics takes upto 48 hours to process data and that probably is the reason for this discrepancy.
Other things
There are other things easier to do in Plausible than GA4 that are worth mentioning below. Such insights have their own standard reports in the GA4 interface but can still be complicated.
Traffic acquisition report
It’s easy to see your traffic acquisition channels, sources, referrals, and exact UTM-tracked parameters in one place in Plausible. As usual, selecting any entry will further segment your dashboard too.
And you can see how many visits vs uniques you got from each channel, source, campaign, etc.
We also do a bunch of other stuff that GA4 does not, like consolidating duplicate entries stemming from case-sensitivity, correctly grouping traffic from AI referrals, etc. There’s a good overview provided here.
In GA4, you get a separate Traffic acquisition and User acquisition report. Traffic acquisition tracks the sources from where traffic is acquired. User acquisition tracks the sources from where individual users are acquired.
In this report, you get a breakdown of traffic, key events, etc., by channels by default. But needing more info like UTM source/medium, needs you to add a secondary dimension. Something like this:
Demographic and tech reports
In Plausible, these are again straightforward to get as is visible in our live demo.
In GA4, country, region and city need to be selected as a primary and/or secondary dimension in Demographic reports –– one at a time. Plus city info is not accurate in GA4 due to IP anonymization measures.
Same thing needs to be done for getting the Browser, OS, device info, etc., in yet another “Tech details” report. Phew.
Entry Pages report
This is available in Plausible right beside the Top Pages and Exit Pages report.
You do get a landing page report in GA4 which shows the pages where visitors first land on your site. However, “Entrances” as a metric is only available in custom reports, a.k.a. Explorations.
This confuses GA4 users because landing pages and entrances measure the same thing but the only difference between them is that the former is a dimension with its own standard report while the latter is a metric that can be used to create custom reports.
Custom dimensions
In Plausible, you can straight away filter your dashboard by a collected custom property. Custom properties is our simpler version of custom dimensions. See an example of filtering the dashboard just by using a custom property.
In GA4, they need to be added as a secondary dimension to the particular report you are viewing. For more holistic insights, you need to open the Explorations reports.
On top of that, custom dimensions are not easy to set up in GA4. You need to set up some events first (while ensuring they don’t fall under existing categories of events in GA’s documentation), then attach parameters using Google Tag Manager, followed by registering the custom dimensions in GA4 interface.
We explain this process and custom dimensions in more detail here.
Other reasons Plausible is a superior web analytics choice
- Plausible is privacy-friendly by default. We never use any cookies or persistent identifiers to track visitors outside of your website. This means you are compliant with various regulations around the world by default, be it GDPR, CCPA, PECR, or anything else. You won’t even need to put up a cookie consent banner from our side.
- Our stats are always more accurate as compared to Google Analytics because their tracking script is widely blocked by ad blockers and privacy-friendly browsers. There are various other reasons for such inaccuracies that we discuss here.
- We have an extremely lightweight script at ~1.5 kB, at least 75x smaller than GA’s.
- You can also compare Plausible with Matomo and Cloudflare Analytics.
- We are open-source and completely transparent with our practices. We don’t sell your customers data, are not involved in ad tech, and are an independent team that only cares about a good product.
Ready to try the simplest web analytics tool? Create your account now!
If you run paid campaigns on Google, Bing, Instagram, any newsletters, or even sponsored videos, etc., to drive sales or other conversion actions like sign-up, it’s a good idea to integrate an analytics tool. This helps fill blind spots about what was actually done on the website after someone clicked on your ad.
For folks using Google Ads, integrating with Google Analytics is a standard choice. This helps the data to freely flow between the two tools and completely visualize the customer journey from clicking an ad in Google search or display network to engaging on the site to finally taking a conversion action.
This particular integration also helps with creating Google Ads conversions based on GA4 key events, viewing the performance of Google Ads conversions within Google Analytics, or running retargeting campaigns on those website visitors who left without taking a desired action.
But Google Analytics is not privacy-friendly, requires a cookie consent banner to operate legally, and most importantly is not accurate at tracking Google Ads (and other campaigns for that matter).
Therefore, you can track your paid campaigns and how they affect conversions on your site, using Plausible Analytics –– the simpler, privacy-friendly (no consent banner required), and more accurate alternative to Google Analytics.
In this article, we cover Plausible Analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics for tracking paid campaigns, especially Google Ads, better. We also share what all cannot be done with Plausible <> Google Ads due to our privacy-friendly nature.
- What’s wrong with Google Analytics?
- Setup and track your paid campaigns with Plausible
- Using Google Ads with a privacy-first analytics tool
- Give Plausible a try
What’s wrong with Google Analytics?
Google Analytics does not track ads performance accurately because it often struggles to track conversions accurately. C’mon Google, you had one job!
If you were to compare the number of conversions––like filling up a contact form or purchasing something––within Google Analytics and another tool measuring the same thing (like in your marketing automation tool or CRM), you would see some differences.
Orbit Media did an independent experiment like that recently and found such results, claiming that every number in Google Analytics is wrong. Here’s why:
- Consent banners: Google Analytics requires a consent banner. If visitors decline, their sessions cannot be tracked.
- Ad blockers and privacy-friendly browsers: GA4 is widely blocked by browsers like Safari, Firefox, and by various ad blockers.
So the conversions are underreported by about 20.3% in GA4 when using a consent banner, and about 11.3% even without using a consent banner.
There are other ways in which Google Analytics is inaccurate, for reasons like spam and bot traffic skewing data, conversion attribution inaccuracy, data modeling, etc. We cover all this here.
Why choose Plausible Analytics over Google Analytics?
Plausible offers other advantages and makes a lot of sense as an analytics tool of choice.
- Lightweight script: Plausible’s tracking script is at least 75x smaller than GA4’s, not slowing down your sit
- Simple dashboard: No complex menus—just effective, actionable insights.
- Privacy-friendly by design: Plausible doesn’t require a cookie consent banner because it doesn’t track or store personal data.
- Dedicated support: You get faster assistance directly from the core team, something missing from Google Analytics.
We have a detailed comparison here.
Setup and track your paid campaigns with Plausible
While setting up your ads in Google or anywhere, make sure to UTM-tag your links. This will help Plausible to correctly identify the traffic as paid, from which referral exactly, which campaigns, terms, and content used as specified in the UTM-tagging done by you.
Please note we work with a last-touch attribution model because of our privacy-first nature. This means that the traffic source from which such sessions were acquired where conversions happened, are the ones credited for that conversion.
Tagging URLs in Google Ads
When it comes to Google Ads, you can utilize either auto-tagging or manual UTM tagging. Here’s how to do it:
Using auto-tagging in Google Ads
Google Ads’ auto-tagging generates a GCLID (Google Click ID) for tracking ad performance. It is turned on by default. When someone clicks your ad, auto-tagging adds a parameter called GCLID to the URLs.
For example, if someone clicks your ad for www.yourwebsite.com, the final URL will look like www.yourwebsite.com/?gclid=123xyz.
To check if it is turned on for you, follow these steps:
Step 1: Sign in to your Google Ads account.
Step 2: Click “Admin” (gear icon) in the bottom left corner and select Account Settings.
Step 3: Find the Auto-tagging section and check the box next to “Tag the URL that people click through from my ad” if not already checked.
Step 4: Click Save.
Once auto-tagging is enabled, Plausible will detect the traffic from links with GCLID parameters. While we strip out the unique identifiers to comply with GDPR, you can still associate traffic with your Google Ads.
Traffic from Google Ads will be categorized as following in the Top Sources report:
- In the “Channels” tab as “Paid Search”
- In the “Sources” tab as “Google”
- In the utm_medium as “(gclid)”
Manually tagging links with UTM parameters
With the auto-tagging method, you won’t be able to pinpoint the exact campaign, content or terms that brought you traffic. For more granular tracking or if you prefer not to use auto-tagging, you can manually add UTM parameters to your ad URLs.
When UTM tags are present in the URL, it takes priority over other parameters. And unlike the “gclid” and “msclkid” marketing parameters, we do not strip the values of UTM tags which provides you more context.
To track your campaigns using this method, follow these steps:
Step 1: Create a UTM-tagged URL. You can utilize the Google Campaign URL Builder for this purpose or do it manually. For example: https://yourwebsite.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=spring_sale&utm_content=text_ad&utm_term=shoes``
Explanation of parameters:
- utm_source: Platform driving traffic (e.g., Google).
- utm_medium: Type of traffic (e.g., PPC).
- utm_campaign: Campaign name (e.g., Spring Sale).
- utm_content: Used to differentiate ad creatives (e.g., Text Ad).
- utm_term: Keyword or target term (e.g., Shoes).
You can learn more about UTM tracking in our guide.
Step 2: Add the tagged URL to your Google Ads.
- Navigate to “Campaigns” from the left sidebar -> “Ads”
- Select the ad you want to edit or create a new ad.
- Paste the UTM-tagged URL into the Final URL field.
- Save your changes.
Now, traffic from these ads will appear in Plausible under the Campaigns tab of the Top Sources report, categorized by UTM parameters.
Tracking campaign performance in Plausible
In a nutshell, our simple dashboard allows you to filter and visualize campaign performance effectively in three steps:
- Filter campaign data: Use the Campaigns tab to isolate specific traffic sources, mediums, or campaigns (e.g., utm_campaign=holiday_sale).
- Track conversion goals (e.g., form submissions or purchases) and other activity on the site (like which pages visited) in Plausible, to see how many visitors from ads completed them.
- Use funnels: Create a funnel to visualize the customer journey and conversion drop-offs at each stage.
The “Top Sources” report in Plausible (check out our live demo) which shows your traffic acquisition sources will show you which exact campaign or ad serving brought you how much traffic. Such traffic can be isolated by filtering the dashboard with the exact acquisition source.
You can isolate traffic by selecting any UTM parameter from the campaigns tab:
This filtered dashboard shows what all happened in the sessions acquired from those campaigns –– which pages were visited, which conversion goals were completed, and even which locations these visitors were from (including VPN entries), which devices, etc. they used.
You can set your site conversion goals using this guide, to help visualize the whole customer journey. Here’s an example of what a filtered dashboard would look like (notice the two filters at the top):
It’s as simple as that. You can also utilize funnels to visualize the percentage of visitors who completed a desired path exactly in their journey. And create audience segments.
This way, you can track anything you want to with Plausible. For example:
- If you’re a SaaS, you can track the product sign ups coming from your ads.
- If you’re an e-commerce, you can track the revenue affected by your ads and calculate your ROI.
Having said that, if you are looking for a deeper integration of Google Ads with Plausible, we have the following limitations due to our privacy-first nature and out-of-the-box compliance with the different cookie laws and privacy regulations such as GDPR and PECR.
We do not track, collect nor store any personal data or personally identifiable information. The goal of Plausible Analytics is to track overall trends in your website traffic, it is not to track individual visitors and contribute to surveillance capitalism.
The privacy of your website visitors is important to us so we do not track any individual people. All the data is in aggregate only.
We also do not utilize or generate any cookies or persistent identifiers. We generate a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitors on a website and we reset this string once per day. You can read more about these decisions here.
Using Google Ads with a privacy-first analytics tool
Importing Plausible goals into Google Ads
With Plausible, you can easily track pageview and custom goals, including revenue tracking and attribute them back to your paid campaigns using UTM parameters as explained above.
But if you want to import this goals/conversion data into Google Ads, it is unfortunately not possible currently. Even though we provide the options to export all your stats in a CSV and through our Stats API, whatever data you export stays privacy-friendly and aggregated.
It is Google Ads’ requirement to use at least one of unique identifiers (hashed) when importing conversion data into their interface, in order to associate conversions with specific ad clicks. It can be a GCLID, or an email ID/phone number from your CRM in case of offline conversions. Here’s the official template:
As per this official Google Ads doc, “If you’re importing conversions from clicks using Google Click ID (GCLID), don’t remove the Google Click ID field or your import will fail.”
As mentioned above, we strip the unique identifiers before recording the traffic in Plausible.
Vice versa, i.e. importing Google Ads conversion data into Plausible is possible using this CSV format. We also allow importing GA4 stats into Plausible.
Running retargeting campaigns
With Google Ads <> Google Analytics, you can retarget those visitors who didn’t convert initially. For this, you need to enable Google Signals, which tracks user activity across sites and devices when they’re logged into their Google accounts.
This enables user profiling based on browsing behavior and also populates demographic details like age and gender under GA4’s “User Attributes.” However, this requires user consent as it falls under a marketing feature.
Because Plausible is privacy-first, we don’t track or store personal data, so retargeting isn’t possible. This aligns with our commitment to respecting user privacy and complying with laws like GDPR and PECR.
Even with Google Analytics, remarketing will become more difficult as third-party cookies will be getting phased out. Instead, consider privacy-friendly alternatives such as:
- Contextual advertising: Target users based on the content they’re engaging with.
- Newsletter advertising: Reach audiences directly in their inboxes.
- Private Marketplace Deals (PMP): Use curated ad deals that respect user privacy.
We cover the situation in-depth along with solutions here.
Give Plausible a try
In summary, Plausible provides an ethical, efficient, and privacy-first way to track your paid campaigns. While it has some limitations with Google Ads integration, it’s a solid alternative for those seeking accurate, lightweight analytics. You can start a free trial now, with no credit card required.
When you first see your bounce rate of x%, it can be confusing making you think about what it is, is it good to have a higher or lower bounce rate, how is it being calculated for my site, what are some industry benchmarks, what can I do to improve it, etc. Let’s answer all questions.
- Understanding Bounce Rate
- What is considered a good bounce rate in 2025?
- How to check my website’s Bounce rate?
- Interpreting bounce rate data
- How to decrease your bounce rate?
- Bouncing off 👋
Understanding Bounce Rate
Imagine you have a website with ten web pages. You get visitors from different sources like social media, paid campaigns, organic search, referrals, etc.
You ideally want these visitors to engage with your website and maybe take some necessary actions like signing up. For that to happen, the visitors would need to take any of the following actions:
- Engage with more than one page.
- Take a conversion action.
Essentially, the percentage of visitors who are not taking any of these actions during their sessions is the bounce rate. A visitor to a website is said to have “bounced” away when they leave without interacting further with your website.
They could leave by pressing the back button of their browser, closing the tab, or going to another website. Website owners should typically aim for low bounce rates.
High bounce rates indicate low user engagement, meaning visitors may not be finding your content engaging or relevant enough to explore further.
Bounce rate formula
Bounce Rate = (Total single-page sessions / Total Sessions) * 100
Where:
- Total single-page sessions is the number of sessions in which users only visited one page before leaving the website.
- Total sessions is the total number of sessions for that page or website.
This formula gives a percentage indicating how often visitors leave immediately after arriving. The bounce rate metric is key to understanding engagement on a specific page or site.
In addition to this, if a visitor takes specified actions on the website, and even if they don’t visit another page, it is still considered an engaged session and doesn’t count towards the bounce rate.
Bounce rate vs Engagement rate vs Exit rate
Bounce rate is the opposite of engagement rate. If you measure the percentage of visitors who engage, i.e. take any of the aforementioned actions, with your website in a specific time period, you will get your engagement rate.
The exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website from a specific page, regardless of whether they engaged with the content or navigated through other parts of the site before exiting. This helps in understanding the top most pages from which your visitors typically exit the site.
Optimizing these metrics is critical for enhancing user experience and, ultimately, conversion rates.
What is considered a good bounce rate in 2025?
The general understanding is that lower the bounce rate, the better it is. It is because this means that your entry pages are capable of prompting visitors to engage with the site and that you are attracting the right kind of audience.
But it also depends. It depends how much bounce rate you should be expecting based on:
- The industry you are operating in.
- Whether you deal in B2B or B2C.
- The nature of the entry page from which visitors bounce off.
Let’s see why.
Bounce rate benchmarks by industry (in descending order)
Bounce rates vary significantly by industry and the type of entry page.
We have created these ranges based on reported average bounce rates from studies conducted by digital marketing agencies and tools like HubSpot, Siege Media, etc.
Content websites and pages: 65% - 90%
Content sites or such pages/sections in a website like blog, news portal, glossary, references, help articles, often have the highest bounce rates.
For eg. A visitor clicks on an interesting news piece about a new scientific discovery from their social media feed, reads that particular piece, and leaves the site. Generally, there’s no other engagement involved.
If, however, the site engages users with gated content, mandatory forms, etc., the bounce rate becomes moderate, reaching as low as 30%. But, these strategies shouldn’t be employed for the sake of reducing bounce rates and the priority should always be creating people-first content.
Landing pages: 60% - 90%
Landing pages are designed for conversions. Counter-intuitive but landing pages experience one of the highest bounce rates and there’s a lot of room for improvement. It is surely a red flag and what needs to be optimized is highly contextual.
For eg. You may need to communicate the value of a particular feature better through the landing page, make it less annoying if there are too many calls-to-action or desperate attempts to sell, or it may so happen that it is a single-page site of a freelancer and that’s why it experiences a high bounce rate by default.
Service industry websites (Legal, Automotive, etc.): 50% - 70%
Service-based sites generally have moderate bounce rates, as visitors may be researching but not immediately ready to contact or convert.
B2B websites: 25% - 65%
B2B sites tend to have lower bounce rates as users often conduct thorough research and may view multiple pages before making decisions.
If your B2B site’s bounce rate is less than 30%, you are doing a great job.
Travel and Hospitality: 40% - 60%
Visitors research and compare various options, which can lead to moderately high bounce rates, although this can vary based on page type.
Real Estate: 30% - 55%
Real estate sites see varying bounce rates, with users frequently engaging with multiple listings and search filters.
Retail & eCommerce websites: 20% - 55%
Retail and eCommerce sites usually have lower bounce rates as most visitors browse products, explore options, check details, create wishlists, share products, etc. Even if they don’t make a purchase, the high engagement rates make them have one of the lowest bounce rates across industries.
A rule of thumb to go by
Looking at the ranges above, your bounce rates can vary anywhere from 20% to 90%, depending upon your industry and types of pages.
We believe a good benchmark for bounce rate is aiming for 50% or lower across your entire site. This indicates that visitors are finding your content engaging and are encouraged to explore the site.
How to check my website’s Bounce rate?
To check your bounce rate, your traffic needs to be analyzed for some time and for that you need a web analytics tool like Plausible. When you implement Plausible on your site, bounce rate is available as a key metric at the top of the dashboard by default, with no special configurations needed.
Check out our website’s live stats here to get a glimpse. You will also be able to see the percentage increase or decrease in the bounce rate over the selected time range and analyze your growth patterns.
You can also monitor the bounce rate for individual pages, specific segments, or particular sections of your site.
Interpreting bounce rate data
So you found your site’s bounce rate. What about individual pages as each of them would have different bounce rates? What about the sessions acquired through your traffic sources.
It is very easy to segment your bounce rates by plenty of different dimensions tracked for your site. Even a combination of different filters (essentially creating audience segments) is possible.
By segmenting bounce rates by page, source, device, etc., you can also see how your metrics compare to the site’s average bounce rate.
Segment bounce rate by pages
The bounce rate can tell you a lot about how your page is performing. It reveals whether or not visitors are engaged with your content and if they view other pages on your website or complete conversion actions, after landing on the initial page.
In Plausible, you get a “Top Pages” report out of the box. Clicking the associated “Details” button shows the bounce rate for each page separately. You can even sort your list of pages by bounce rate in ascending or descending order.
Clicking on any entry (or using the Filter option) in this report segments your dashboard and all metrics by the sessions associated with that page view.
For eg., We compared the bounce rate on our sign-up page in Plausible between Q2 and Q3 of 2024.
It can be seen that the bounce rate decreased by 1% from Q2 to Q3. It is a positive indicator.
Segment bounce rate by traffic sources
You can repeat the above exercise with your Top Sources report. For eg. If we compare how the sessions acquired to the Plausible site from Reddit engage in a comparison of Q3 from Q2, we see that the bounce rate has increased by 3%.
So we can dig further into the posts on Reddit that contributed to this traffic and see what caused this. Generally, it so happens that the messaging or intent of the post (whoever posted it) doesn’t match with that of the landing page, causing high bounce rates.
Segment bounce rate by locations and devices
Similar to above, you can explore your locations and devices/operating systems/device sizes reports on Plausible and analyze the respective bounce rates. With the locations reporting, you’ll need to use the filtering option to find out the bounce rate though.
Segment bounce rate by custom properties
Custom properties lets you track any additional data you want to track on your site. Here are some examples:
- Subscription Level – Tracks user subscription tiers, such as free, premium, or enterprise.
- Content Author – Identifies the author of a blog post or page for author-specific analytics.
- Logged-in Status – Differentiates between logged-in and logged-out users.
- Product Category – Tracks the category of a product viewed or purchased to understand trends.
The great news is that bounce rates can be segmented by this information too! For eg., we track our blog’s performance by authors in Plausible.
If I use the custom property filter to check the bounce rates associated with my content on the Plausible site (in a Q2 vs Q3 ‘24 comparison), we can see the metrics as following:
This way, you can pretty much evaluate the performance of any custom property you are using on your website.
More such examples can be: which category of products see high vs low bounce rates, which specific link text (e.g., ‘Download Now’ vs. ‘Learn More’) drives users to stay longer on the site, or which navigation menu items (e.g., ‘Pricing’ vs. ‘Features’) correlate with lower bounce rates.
And don’t forget, you can mix and match multiple filters to do a deeper analysis! Here’s one such segment to inspire you (click the “3 filters” beside the time range selector to understand the filters).
How to decrease your bounce rate?
Don’t try to aim for a zero bounce rate because it’s practically impossible and unnecessary for all sense and purposes. There will, for instance, always be people who land on your site by mistake and immediately exit.
Or, there will always be people with lower attention spans or may have found what they wanted and choose to return to your site at a later time.
Or, if the page is very straightforward and informative and gets to the root of what the user wants to know, such as contact pages, pricing, FAQs, etc., the visitor could bounce away with intentions of taking the conversation, and ultimate conversion, to another channel.
So, not every bounce warrants an optimization. There are some best practices you can apply to keep your bounce rates healthy.
Use relevant and engaging content
Choose the content format that resonates most with your audience. For instance, if you’re a fashion brand launching a new collection, visuals like photos and videos are likely to be more engaging than a long text-based article.
Understanding that the audience would feel excited about the new line by posting pictures and/or videos about the new product makes more sense and can actually lead to high engagement and low bounce rates.
Choose content formats that make sense for the topic and will keep people interested.
Know your audience
Unusually high bounce rates mean that either you haven’t found your right audience yet or you have the right audience but can’t produce relevant content for them yet.
Your content should feel relevant and useful to the people visiting your site. High bounce rates mean that visitors aren’t finding what they expected. Know your audience’s needs and address them to encourage visitors to explore more of your site.
This is something we do at Plausible, for instance. We know that many of our subscribers are frustrated Google Analytics users so we try to educate them about the differences between the two tools. And they are some of our most viral posts!
Make your site fast and mobile-friendly
A slow or hard-to-use site is a sure shot way to make people leave quickly, even if you created the perfect content for the perfect audience. Ensure your pages load very fast.
And don’t forget mobile users. A design that works well on mobile devices (if relevant to you) will ensure that at least visitors don’t bounce off because of subpar tech.
Avoid too many popups
Pop-ups can easily turn visitors off if they’re distracting or unrelated to the page. Keep them to a minimum, using them only when they really add value.
Match the page to visitor intent
If you’re seeing high bounce rates from a particular source, like email campaigns or social media, it could mean that visitors aren’t finding what they expected on the page. Make sure your landing page aligns with what’s promised in the link or ad.
This is also true for organic traffic from search engine clicks. You may rank for some keywords but if your content doesn’t match with the search intent, you’re likely to experience high bounce rates.
For example, if an email campaign is promoting a specific product or offer, ensure the landing page directly addresses it. This alignment helps visitors feel they’re in the right place, making them more likely to stay and engage further.
Maintain a good site structure
A well-organized site layout makes it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for, keeping them on your site longer. Ensure clear navigation, with helpful internal links, footer links, subscription forms, and well-placed calls-to-action that encourage visitors to explore further.
A clean, intuitive design makes for a more enjoyable browsing experience, and clear paths (like menu bars, sidebars, and footers) help guide visitors naturally through the site.
Run experiments
You can optionally experiment with different approaches to help you learn what keeps visitors engaged. A/B testing, for example, allows you to try out two versions of a page to see which one performs better. You could also gather feedback from visitors on specific elements or content.
Bouncing off 👋
Lastly, high bounce rates isn’t the end of the world. You can surely find many ways out.
P.S. We are in the process of measuring the bounce rate metric in more ways than the typical one, making your life easier and stats more accurate. If you want to find out your site’s bounce rate, start a free trial now.
Having a website means having landing pages and tracking the traffic and performance of pages can bring great amounts of marketing and business insights.
Let’s see what are landing pages, how to easily analyze them and how to use such analysis as a site owner.
- What is a landing page?
- How do I see the pages with most traffic, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, etc.?
- How to use this information as a site owner?
What is a landing page?
Literally, a landing page is a page where visitors “land” on your website after clicking a link on social media, ad, referral, etc.
This is a single web page usually designed with a specific intent/message: to tell about a feature, to educate about a topic (like this page), to get a form filled, to sell something, etc.
A good landing page is well researched for the needs of its audience, consistent with the messaging of the content piece that brought the traffic, clear, straightforward. You can build it programmatically or with the help of a content management system.
Once built, the next step is to track how many visitors each page gets, from where, how, and other performance metrics. Since a website can have many landing pages, it becomes even more important to track what’s working with your audience and what’s not.
How do I see the pages with most traffic, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, etc.?
To analyze the top landing and entry/exit pages on your website, you can use a tool like Plausible Analytics. You can start tracking the performance of landing pages within minutes with Plausible’s standard script itself and no special settings required.
This helps you understand which content or features are drawing in the most traffic, allowing you to gauge interest in specific products, blog posts, pricing pages, or other important sections.
You can also club this information with other analytics like top sources to understand where your traffic is coming from and which channels (e.g., search engines, social media, or referrals) are driving visitors to specific pages.
When you open your Plausible dashboard, one of the key reports you’ll see by default is the “Top Pages” report. It shows you at a glance, which of your landing pages received the most visits, where the visitors land on, and where they exit from, for the time period selected.
If you don’t have an active Plausible account, you can open our live demo in a new tab to play around with the Pages report and the dashboard. Let’s see how to use the reports:
Top, Entry and Exit pages
The Pages report is not only limited to the Top Pages, but you can switch tabs to access the following three types of reports:
- Top Pages – to analyze the pages with the most visitors.
- Entry Pages – to analyze the pages where visitors first land on your site.
- Exit Pages – to analyze the pages where visitors leave your site.
These reports effectively help you pinpoint which pages are drawing in visitors initially, holding their attention, and acting as exit points.
For eg., If you look at our live demo, the top most entries for all the three reports are the same (“/:dashboard,” “/sites”, etc.), suggesting that maximum Plausible visitors enter, stay and exit from their Plausible accounts itself, indicating maximum engagement with the core product.
It can also be used as an insight, because if we were to announce an urgent product update tomorrow, we know an in-app notification may be the best place to do so.
Secondly, you can click the “Details” link to get the full list of the types of pages in question. The associated metrics differ. You can also sort your reports by clicking on any metric.
For instance, sorting by visitors can help you see which pages attract the most visits, while sorting by time on page shows you where visitors spend the most time.
“Top Pages” displays the Visitors, Pageviews, Bounce Rate, and Time on Page. “Entry Pages” displays the Visitors, Total Entrances, and Visit Duration. “Exit pages” displays the Visitors, Total Exits, and Exit Rate.
P.S. You can check out the definitions of such metrics here.
Filter and segment entries
If you click on any entry in any of the three kinds of reports, the entire dashboard gets filtered by it and displays stats associated with that landing page only.
For eg., Our live demo shows that during the past 30 days, ignoring the first few product-specific pages, our landing page on open-source web analytics brought us 1.5k visitors.
Wanting to learn more about acquiring such visitors, we can simply click on this entry to filter the dashboard. And once we do (check the filtered dashboard here), we see that Google, GitHub and DuckDuckGo mostly got us such visitors.
We can also learn about the locations such visitors were from, the devices they used, which goals they completed, etc. It is possible to dig as further as we want, by adding filters by clicking on more such entries and effectively analyzing audience segments.
Tip: If you’re unsure about the landing page path, click the “open in new tab” icon to quickly view the page.
You can also use the “Filter” option to start a fresh workflow. For eg., you can analyze only the landing pages with the URL path containing the word “blog” to analyze the performance of your blog.
Special cases and best practices
While the Pages report is straightforward for most cases, you can see if any of the below cases apply to you and manage them accordingly.
Shield specific traffic from being recorded
You can permanently block traffic from being recorded to specific pages or sections if they aren’t relevant to your analysis (such as a blog preview page) by using the Shields feature.
With the very same feature, you can also allow only specific hostnames to let Plausible track their traffic. This keeps your reports clean and more usable.
Moreover, you can simply filter your dashboard by specific hostnames and see the pages only associated with that. You may be surprised to see the results.
If we filter by Google Translate hostname on our live demo for example, we see completely different results with the Top Pages, sources, cities, everything getting changed.
By the way, we detect and block bot traffic by default so you never have to worry about excluding such traffic.
View combined Pages reports for multiple sites
You may have multiple sites/dashboards in your Plausible account. This could be if you have a Marketing agency, or a collection of tools with separate sites, or may have a different dashboard for multiple subdomains (for eg., “site.com” and “app.site.com”) as a SaaS.
In such cases, you may want aggregated stats from all or some of such sites. You can set this up using roll-up reporting. This way, you can get a birds-eye view of your top performing, and entry and exit pages.
Retain query parameters in a URL
Plausible automatically discards query parameters from URLs to prevent them from showing up as separate pages in the report.
For eg., if someone visits `site.com/index.php?article=some_article&page=11`, it will be recorded as `yoursite.com/index.php`, regardless of the query details. The referrers and UTMs are recorded separately in the Top Sources report though.
If there are specific pages where query parameters are important and should be retained in the report, you can capture the full URL, including the query part.
Shield sensitive information from URLs
In some cases, you might prefer to use a custom URL to replace the actual URL of a page. This is particularly useful for aggregating multiple pages containing user-specific identifiers (e.g., `/profile/12345`), which can impact user privacy and lead to fragmented data in your reports.
By configuring a custom URL in Plausible, you can consolidate data from these pages into a single report entry, maintaining user privacy while simplifying your analytics.
Avoid trailing Slash Discrepancies
Sometimes, you may see identical page paths both with and without a trailing slash (e.g., `/some_article` and `/some_article/`). This discrepancy can create duplicate entries in your Pages report, which may confuse the analysis of traffic to specific pages.
To address this, apply a 301 redirect to standardize URL paths, ensuring all traffic is directed to a single version of each page. This will help you maintain accurate data in the Pages report.
Track Single-Page Applications (SPA) and URL Hashes
Plausible is designed to automatically track page views in single-page applications (SPAs) that use the `pushState` method for routing.
If your site uses a frontend framework that relies on hash-based routing, i.e. URLs ending in `#section` (eg. https://plausible.io/#pricing), you can track these hash-based routes accurately.
This setup enables you to track user navigation within your app without requiring additional configuration, keeping your Pages report comprehensive even in SPA environments.
By understanding and addressing these cases, you can ensure your Pages report remains accurate and reflective of real user behavior on your site. If you need to suggest a new case we should be addressing for accurately tracking landing pages in Plausible, our feedback board is always open.
How to use this information as a site owner?
Let’s see an example first. I noticed that in October 2024, one of the top exit pages for Plausible was our Changelog page. So I applied a filter for the same, denoted by “1” in the screenshot below.
This filtered the dashboard showing that the sessions that saw people exiting through the Changelog page, had 2.4k visitors, 7.6k pageviews, etc.
The next thing I wanted to know was where did such sessions land on? So I switched to the Entry Pages tab, denoted by “2” in the screenshot below.
This clearly showed that, apart from 700 people who directly came to the changelog page and exited from there only (this matches with the bounce rate of 28% too), maximum people were the ones using their dashboards, logging in, etc.
Now that makes sense and is a good sign. We don’t need to guess as to why the Changelog was acting as a top exit page.
So we know that perhaps many subscribers like visiting the changelog before closing their dashboards. Considering that we have ~14k paying subscribers as of November ‘24, 2.4k visitors exhibiting such behavior is a decent chunk of Plausible users and we should optimize the changelog for them.
If you look at “3” in the screenshot, we also know that 5 such people upgraded to a paid plan before exiting. Moreover, the other “Goal Conversions” entries are a good indicator of what other events happened in those sessions.
This helps us build a specific visitor flow and make multiple conclusions and build an understanding of what works for Plausible visitors/users and what doesn’t.
Here’s how our subscribers analyze the Pages reports to analyze their website’s performance:
Identify what’s attracting or throwing off visitors
The Entry Pages report shows which pages are the first touchpoints for visitors. If certain blog posts or product pages are consistently the top entry points, it means they’re resonating well in search engines or through social sharing.
Knowing this, you can keep such pages updated and keep them SEO’d. You can also learn about the kinds of topics that resonate with your audience and create marketing strategies accordingly.
For eg., We at Plausible identified that content about using privacy-friendly analytics serves our visitors better than other types of content. So we try to create similar content on related subjects.
Similarly, if your Exit Pages report shows that visitors are mostly exiting from your pricing page, then it may be an indicator that your pricing is not well accepted by your audience yet.
If you can confirm this conclusion through social media, surveys, or any communication channel with your ideal customers, then you’ll have a great insight about adjusting your pricing accordingly.
Other red flags could be having high exit rates on signup page, documentation, etc. since the user intent is generally high on such pages.
Assess the impact of marketing campaigns
If you run marketing campaigns (e.g., paid ads, email campaigns), the Landing Page report can show if these efforts are driving visitors to the intended pages.
To confirm campaign success, check if visitors land on the pages you’re promoting. If a campaign is meant to drive users to a particular offer or landing page, but that page isn’t showing up here, it may need adjustments.
Make use of UTM tracking for accurately attributing marketing channels. You can also visualize visitor journeys by setting up a funnel in Plausible.
Use the insights to align ad messaging with popular pages, or adjust targeting to increase traffic to underperforming landing pages.
Improve UX on entry pages
Since landing pages are the first impression visitors get of your site, it’s good to optimize them for user experience.
So identify traffic patterns. Like, which landing pages have high traffic but lower visit duration than expected for such pages. Once you identify such a page, filter your dashboard by it and see what the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors with a single page view) looks like.
This can clearly signal areas to improve. Some common optimizations include page load speed, layout, content relevance, clear calls-to-action (CTAs) or links to guide visitors to explore other parts of your site, like product pages, contact forms, or resources.
Optimize low-performing pages
If pages important to business, like your pricing or sign-up page, are low on the list, it could be a signal to improve their visibility –– through SEO, internal linking, or UX adjustments.
Spot opportunities for conversion
For SaaS, pages with high traffic but low conversion are prime candidates for putting efforts into conversion optimization. Common optimizations include A/B testing calls-to-action (CTAs), updating content, or improving page load speed.
Do content planning
Use this report to see which types of blog posts or articles resonate most with your audience. Pages that perform well can give way to future content ideas. Those with lower views might benefit from updates or SEO or being deleted for that matter.
How do you like to use your Pages report? Let us know at [email protected] and all the best. 🚀
Most of the time, we visit a site or a blog with a goal (or at least intent) in mind. Imagine you’re searching for home workout ideas and land on a fitness blog with hundreds of unorganized posts. You were likely looking for something specific, like “yoga for beginners” or “quick cardio routines.”
The presence of such categories helps readers quickly find the content they’re after and makes navigation easier.
Without categories, visitors have to deal with too much scrolling, no overview of what all the content is about, rapid switching of context, and just clutter! You may still find something interesting to read but it could be random.
But if you have a WordPress blog yourself, you may want more from the situation –– you want the visitor to be able to see everything that you offer and take with them back a valuable experience.
Moreover, while a new blog may start with only a few articles, as the content grows, posts can get buried in an unorganized collection. Site searches can be helpful but have a different purpose and depend on the visitor’s limited context, are too specific, and need advanced plugins to show results properly.
If you need something more presentable and user-friendly, you can start categorizing your posts in WordPress.
- What are categories in WordPress posts?
- What is the difference between categories and tags in WordPress?
- How to add categories to your WordPress posts?
- WordPress plugins to enhance and simplify category management
- How to decide on the perfect categories for your posts?
- Tracking the performance of your categories
What are categories in WordPress posts?
Categories in WordPress help organize related posts, by following a commonality among such posts. You have to manually define these categories (unless using a plugin), as we explain in one of the sections below.
Categories work by giving a high-level overview of the topics in the blog. Think of food/recipe blogs that you have seen. They usually categorize their posts by breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Or by easy, intermediate, and advanced.
Or, think of how a travel aggregator’s blog categorizes its blog into city getaways, weekend getaways, mountains, beaches, etc. Imagine landing on such a blog without categories, and getting confused about where to even start.
Basically, categories help in the following:
- Organizing and presenting information based on the way users expect to consume it.
- Providing structure to your site.
- Helping search engines understand a content piece better (sometimes), and improve SEO.
- Planning your content better, keeping a balance amongst the things you post.
What is the difference between categories and tags in WordPress?
Categories and tags are commonly confused, since both help organize content and both help search engines understand your content better. But think of it like walking into a clothing store.
You see a female, male and kids section. Those are high-level categories, created for a smooth experience for both the customers and staff.
Let’s say you went to the kids section. Here, each shirt could be tagged with different (but sharing with many other shirts) kinds of attributes. Size, color, price, new in stock. These are like tags.
So the difference is simple –– You choose categories for a high-level categorization of your content and don’t change it again and again quickly. It may be 3-8 categories depending upon your niche, use case, and volume.
And you choose tags, like keywords, for each specific post to define what it’s about –– they are pretty much meta tags!
Say, you teach digital marketing on your blog. Your categories could be “Social media,” “paid ads,” “SEO.” But your individual posts within each could be about, for eg., mastering LinkedIn hashtags, exploring newsletter advertising, or doing SEO with AI, respectively.
Tags would be more specific to each post –– like keywords. For example, if you write a blog post about using hashtags on LinkedIn, you might use the tags: “hashtags,” “LinkedIn tips,” “social media strategy,” and “organic reach.”
Categories help organize the broader structure of your content, while tags provide more detailed descriptions to help readers and search engines identify the specific focus of each post. Categories are stable, while tags can be more flexible and change with each new post.
A post can be a part of multiple categories and tags as well.
How to add categories to your WordPress posts?
While writing a post in WordPress, open the sidebar to your right and locate the Categories metabox. You will see the option to add and select (multiple selections are possible) categories.
You can even add a “Parent category” if you need more hierarchy. Hierarchy, by the way, is not possible with tags. Right below that, you can add tags too. The tip is to simply write the top 2-8 keywords related to the post.
You will also notice an “Uncategorized” category. This is the default WordPress category. It can be edited. You can assign any other category as default by visiting Settings -> Writing, in your dashboard. But having one default category is always mandatory.
You can also add and manage categories through your dashboard, by locating “Posts” in the left sidebar and visiting “Categories.” Here, you can add a description as well, and choose to make it public if your theme supports it.
Other common questions include:
How to edit or delete categories?
Visit the Posts -> Categories from your dashboard. Here, you can edit, quick-edit (just the name and slug), or delete that category as well.
You can use the bulk actions to delete multiple categories at once.
What happens to posts or pages associated with a category that is deleted in WordPress?
When a category is deleted, all the posts listed under that category get auto-assigned to the default category. From our example above, a deleted post would have gone into the default “Uncategorized” category.
If a post was under multiple categories, the other categories would remain unaffected.
The other thing to note is that pages don’t have categories in WordPress, this is only related to blog posts.
How to convert categories to tags?
This is also possible in the same Categories Settings screen. Find the link to “category to tag converter” at the right-bottom side of the screen to start the process.
How to add categories to a menu?
You can even add categories to your menu bar for easy access. There are three ways to do this, as explained in-depth here.
WordPress plugins to enhance and simplify category management
The default WordPress categories feature is solid. There are many available plugins for more advanced needs. For instance, if you need categories for not only posts but also pages, media, etc., or you want to be able to generate categories automatically.
Let’s have a look at some of the plugins and what they can do:
TaxoPress
TaxoPress basically works to categorize and tag all your WordPress content: pages, WooCommerce product categories and bbPress topic tags. It also integrates with multiple AI tools to suggest tags automatically.
It also shows lists of related posts with similar tags and categories, allows you to create a customizable display of all the terms in one taxonomy, and do many other things.
Rated at 4.6, updated regularly, and 60k+ active installations. If you need more advanced features, there’s a Pro version too. Check out the full overview.
Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order
This plugin allows you to easily reorder your WordPress categories, tags, and any custom taxonomies using a drag-and-drop interface. It doesn’t require coding knowledge and automatically updates your site’s taxonomy order both on the front end and in the admin panel.
It works with hierarchical taxonomies and offers flexibility in sorting options. It’s available in multiple languages.
Rated at 4.5, updated regularly, and 500k+ active installations. If you need more features, there’s an advanced version too. Check out the full overview.
No Category Base (WPML)
This plugin removes the default “/category/” base from WordPress category URLs, making them cleaner (e.g., from mysite.com/category/my-category to mysite.com/my-category).
It requires no setup, works with multiple sub-categories, redirects old category links, and is compatible with SEO practices and WPML. It’s simple, lightweight, and works out of the box without breaking other plugins.
Rated at 4.6, updated regularly, and 100k+ active installations. Check out the full overview.
Media Library Categories
This plugin allows you to organize media items in your WordPress library using categories. It adds category management features to your media library, enabling you to add, edit, or remove categories.
You can also bulk assign categories to multiple items and filter media based on categories when using the gallery shortcode. The premium version adds more functionality, such as filtering categories while inserting media into posts or pages.
Rated at 4.2, updated regularly, and 20k+ active installations. If you need more advanced features, there’s a Pro version too. Check out the full overview.
Real Category Management: Content Management in Category Folders
This one helps you organize WordPress content like posts, pages, and WooCommerce products by displaying categories as folder structures, similar to a file manager.
You can easily drag and drop content into categories, create, rename, or delete categories, and rearrange them. It supports hierarchical taxonomies and custom post types, but the free version is limited to posts.
Rated at 4.0, updated regularly, and 3k+ active installations. If you need more advanced features, there’s a Pro version too. Check out the full overview.
List category posts
This plugin allows you to display posts from a specific category on any post or page using a simple shortcode. You can customize how posts are displayed, including the number of posts, ordering, and what details (like author or excerpt) to show.
It supports custom CSS for styling and includes a widget for easier integration. You can also enable features like AJAX pagination and create custom templates for advanced layouts.
Rated at 4.7, updated regularly, and 100k+ active installations. Check out the full overview.
How to decide on the perfect categories for your posts?
When you’re just starting, don’t overthink category names—just jot down your upcoming blog topics and group them in a way that feels natural.
It’s also fine to skip categories altogether in the beginning and focus on creating high-quality content and building an audience. You can always come back to it later.
If you are a few blog posts old, and have some readership as well, it’s time to analyze some data:
General data: Understand what your audience likes, what’s trending, and make/adjust your categories accordingly. This can be done by directly interacting through support tickets, sales calls, social media, surveys, etc.
Again taking a recipes blog example: if you were just starting out and instinctively categorized your posts into breakfast, lunch and dinner. After building some audience, you realized that students living far from families consume your content the most.
In this case, you could reverse-engineer your specific audience’s needs and consider recreating the categories as 10-minute meals, kitchen hacks, beginner friendly, etc. That brings us to keyword research as well.
Keyword data: Another thing that can help with naming categories is keyword research.
For eg. If you never researched and found out that your student audience also searches for “cheap and easy meals,” you could have easily skipped having that as a category, which could have further cost you your readership.
Web analytics data: You may be having a web analytics solution in place like Google Analytics or Plausible. Start seeing which kinds of posts get the most traffic and engagement.
This will help you understand your strong points that also resonate with the audience. Now you can double down on such posts and create categories accordingly.
When your categories have also been there for some time, you can start analyzing their performance as well, like we explain in the last section of the article.
Examples of categories
Here are a couple of our favorite examples for some inspiration:
-
The Basecamp Articles page is clearly demarcated into six categories: Project Management, Remote Work, Leadership, Productivity, Entrepreneurship, Agency, and Design.
Visit this page to see the complete design.
-
The GitLab blog also features different categories as you see below. Clicking on either of them takes you to a dedicated page of related blog posts.
Tracking the performance of your categories
If you care about finding out how certain categories actually affect traffic, engagement and conversions on your WordPress site, the Plausible web analytics plugin can help with that.
You will be able to track sessions on your site where certain categories’ posts were viewed, while understanding more things about those sessions –– which channels they were acquired from, what was the average time spent on the site, bounce rates, landing pages visited, goals achieved, etc.
To make this possible, you need to turn on a setting called “Authors and categories” within the Plausible plugin. The plugin itself takes less than 2 minutes to set up, and tracking categories –– no matter how and where you implement them –– is basically a switch which needs to be turned on.
Start by installing the plugin using this guide. Once done, open your WordPress dashboard and go to “Plugins” in the left-sidebar. Locate “Plausible Analytics” and go to its settings. Find the “Enhanced Measurements” section, and turn on “Authors and categories.”
This setup will start sending post author names, categories, and custom taxonomies as custom properties with each pageview. You can filter your Plausible dashboard (live demo) by a specific category (and/or author) to see stats for their posts or to check a category’s popularity.
For eg. Look at this demo newswebsite.com’s dashboard. It has multiple categories and by using the filtering feature, we can select “opinion” and “activism” for example.
Then, we get the following dashboard, where we can see how these categories are associated with 81.8k unique visitors, 92.5k total visits, and 125k pageviews –– all indicating an upwards trend as well. This means that the category is resonating well with the audience!
But look at the decreasing views per visit and visit duration, and the increasing bounce rate. This is indicative of the low engaging factor of these categories. So now we know that it has to be improved!
Similarly, you can look at other metrics of this report and even click on any such entry to filter the dashboard further.
For eg. We can see that after Direct traffic, newsletters and Google results are what brings the most traffic to this category of pages. Beside this report, we can also see which articles within this category actually perform the best.
And by playing around a bit, we can find out which pages were these sessions welcomed to (entry pages) or where they exited from. Or get deeper information like UTM campaigns that helped bring people to this category, the locations and devices used.
And most importantly, you can find out if any goals were converted during such sessions –– sales, signups, visits to certain pages, etc.
Is Plausible worth it?
We encourage everyone to go through our free 30-day trial. Our plugin is highly rated at 4.9 stars, take pride in being a simpler alternative to Google Analytics 4. We:
- Are proven to be more accurate
- Are lightweight by at least 75 times as compared to GA4 script
- Block bot traffic by default
- Are less blocked by ad blockers and privacy-first browsers
- Have compliances in-built, no consent banner needed from our side
- Are open-source and privacy-first, and more accepted by aware end-users
Take a look! :D
TL;DR:
- Overview of useful WordPress plugins for implementing site search forms and displaying customizable search results.
- Tracking accurate, advanced site search analytics with one-click.
- Combining search analytics with purchase data, along with other metrics like pages visited and geographies, to create a comprehensive purchase journey analysis.
- GDPR-compliant, user-friendly, WordPress plugin. No consent banner required.
Having a search experience built in your WordPress website is many times a major expectation from your visitors.
This is especially true if you run an e-commerce store, a publication or a blog, a knowledge-base, an aggregator website like one for booking buses/hotels/flights, matching job profiles or dating profiles, a books/songs library, etc.
An on-site search bar is great for user-experience as it instantly matches them to what they are looking for. It is also a fantastic way of getting customer insights directly from the horse’s mouth: knowing about their demands, preferences, sales opportunities, current trends, stock-up requirements, etc.
Tracking what your customers are looking for when they land on your website can help understand if they:
- Find what they were looking for, i.e. do you even offer what they are searching for?
- Convert or not, when they found what they were searching for?
Both these answers open doors to relevant actions that will improve your business. To illustrate, assume you sell socks in an eCommerce store.
With site search terms data, you find out that visitors were searching for “red Christmas ankle socks” but it is not something you currently sell. If there are enough searches for the same, maybe you should stock these socks up.
Or maybe, you should not stock them up in case you don’t cater to seasonal searches or cannot ship to the country where these searches came from.
Alternatively, let’s say you already sell “red Christmas ankle socks” and the data tells you that your site visitors found what they were searching for but didn’t buy from your site. Then, you’ll know that something is not working right for them: your product quality, pictures, description, pricing, shipping time, reviews, etc.
Or say, you run a blog on B2B marketing. If you find out about the topics your readers typically search for, you can prioritize those articles.
In this article, we are sharing how you can implement an end-to-end search tracking –– right from getting the search functionality up in your site to mapping it to other relevant business analytics, so you can make data-informed business decisions.
- Implementing site search in WordPress
- Site search plugins lack analytics
- Plausible WordPress plugin for accurate site search and web analytics
- Getting started with the Plausible plugin
- Plausible in action
- Some more tips
Implementing site search in WordPress
The default WordPress search function is an option, but it is usually considered basic.
Here is a quick, high-level overview of some popular plugins that you can check out, followed by a deeper analysis of features.
| Plugin name | Pricing options | Rating | Active installations |
|---|---|---|---|
| SearchWP Live Ajax Search | Free; paid plans starting $99/year | 4.9 | 50,000+ |
| Ivory Search | Free; paid plans starting $19.99/year | 4.9 | 100,000+ |
| Relevanssi | Free; paid plans starting $131/year | 4.8 | 100,000+ |
| Ajax Search Lite | Free; $39 for a regular license | 4.7 | 80,000+ |
| Jetpack Search | Free; paid plans starting $70/year | 4.4 | 5,000+ |
| Better Search | Free & open source; pro license available | 4.5 | 7,000+ |
| Search & Filter | Free; paid plans starting $25/year | 4.6 | 50,000+ |
| WP Search with Algolia | Free; paid plans starting with pay-as-you-go | 4.5 | 7,000+ |
| WP Extended Search | Free & open-source | 4.9 | 20,000+ |
| FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce | Free; paid plans starting $49/year | 4.9 | 100,000+ |
Let’s explore each option in more depth.
SearchWP Live Ajax Search
SearchWP plugin provides real-time, Ajax-powered search results with indexing capabilities. One of the most popular plugins for this purpose, it constantly offers thoughtful, newer and powerful features.
Usually suitable for websites with diverse content types requiring flexible search customization.
Key features include:
- Real-time Ajax search for instant results.
- Templates to make custom, embeddable search forms.
- Indexes, extracts, searches and presents various content types like custom post types, custom fields, taxonomies, PDF/Office documents, and more.
- Search results support Boolean search and keyword stemming.
- Integrates with Multisite, WPML, eCommerce platforms, and more.
- Analytics on search queries, visitor clicks, click-through-rates.
- Customizable search result ordering for better relevance.
Things to consider:
- Might be an overkill for smaller websites that don’t need complex indexing.
- Requires some technical setup for users unfamiliar with advanced search customization.
- Paid versions can be expensive for smaller budgets.
Ivory Search
Ivory Search – WordPress Search Plugin is another preferred one. It helps you display custom search forms in various areas of your site, including the header, footer, sidebar, widget areas, navigation menu, or within posts, pages, and custom post types. You can embed these forms using shortcodes.
Key features include:
- Searches WooCommerce products, including SKU and attributes, with customizable results.
- Indexes media files (images, audio, video, PDFs) by title, caption, and description.
- Creates unlimited search forms tailored for specific content types.
- Displays search forms in headers, footers, navigation menus, or anywhere using shortcodes.
- Highlights searched terms and supports fuzzy matching and keyword stemming.
- Controls the display order of search results based on multiple criteria.
- Excludes specific content types from search results.
Things to consider:
- Can be challenging for beginners to configure the unlimited search form options without proper guidance.
- Lacks advanced search filtering options like Boolean search or keyword stemming.
Relevanssi
Relevanssi is another powerful plugin that enhances WordPress search by prioritizing relevance in search results and supporting partial word matching, fuzzy matching, and customizable excerpts.
Key features include:
- Search results sorted by relevance rather than date.
- Fuzzy Matching, i.e. supports partial word matching for flexible searches.
- Custom Excerpts, i.e. highlights search terms within results for better visibility.
- Searches comments, tags, categories, and custom fields.
- Allows for AND/OR searches and phrase searching.
- Tracks search queries, popular searches, and queries with no results.
- Compatible with WordPress multisite installations.
- Includes the ability to index custom content types and taxonomies.
Things to consider:
- Can be resource-heavy, especially on large sites with lots of content.
- Setting up custom excerpts or configuring advanced search options may require technical knowledge.
- Costlier than its alternatives.
- No real-time Ajax search, which may be a drawback for users wanting instant results. Although, Relevanssi offers that option as a separate plugin.
Ajax Search Lite
Ajax Search Lite plugin delivers real-time search results with customizable layout options and filtering by categories or tags. It integrates easily into most themes and supports image-based search results. More suitable for small to medium-sized sites.
Key features include:
- Provides real-time results as users type.
- Flexible styles and layout options to match site design.
- Filters search results by content type (posts, pages, custom types).
- Allows searching within specific categories and tags.
- Responsive design: Optimized for mobile devices.
- Keyword suggestions: Auto-suggestions for better search accuracy.
- Displays images in search results for visual engagement.
- Offers custom results layout. Modify result display (list or grid format).
- Shortcode integration: Easy to add to posts, pages, or widgets.
- Compatible with most WordPress themes without major changes.
Things to consider:
- Lacks advanced analytics or search tracking, limiting insights into user search behavior.
- More suitable for smaller or mid-sized sites; large sites may find performance limitations.
- Limited integration with eCommerce platforms, making it less ideal for product-heavy sites. Has basic support for WooCommerce.
Jetpack Search
Jetpack Search plugin offers fast, scalable, and real-time search results with advanced language support and relevance algorithms, making it a considerable choice for large, multilingual websites.
Key features include:
- Provides real-time search results without page reloads.
- Allows users to filter by categories, tags, dates, and custom taxonomies.
- Customizable design.
- Updates the search index within minutes of site changes.
- Supports eCommerce product searches.
- Handles advanced language analysis for 38 languages.
- Spelling correction: Fast and accurate correction of search queries.
- Modern ranking algorithms: Ensures highly relevant search results based on user behavior.
Things to consider:
- Jetpack’s overall plugin can be resource-intensive and may slow down smaller sites.
- Lacks analytics.
- Customization options for search display are not as advanced as some other plugins.
Better Search
Better Search – Relevant search results for WordPress plugin is simple and open-sourced.
Key features include:
- Prioritizes relevance-based search, not date-based.
- Allows template customization for tailored search result displays.
- Search heatmaps: Tracks popular search terms to understand user behavior.
- Supports custom post types, extends search capabilities beyond posts and pages.
- Works with popular caching plugins to ensure performance.
- Easy to install and configure without requiring advanced technical knowledge.
Things to consider:
- Lacks real-time search or Ajax functionality, which can feel slower.
- Customization options for the appearance of search results are limited compared to other plugins.
- Analytics and tracking features are not as detailed as some alternatives.
Search & Filter
Search & Filter plugin refines your content discovery with filtering options. Narrow down results using Categories, Tags, Custom Taxonomies, Post Types, and Publication Dates –– or combine these criteria for precision. This system can replace traditional search boxes, allowing users to filter posts and pages effortlessly.
Key features include:
- Custom search and filtering by categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and post types
- Flexible input types including dropdowns, checkboxes, and radio buttons
- Ajax functionality for results without page reloads
- Result ordering by criteria like date and title
- Drag & drop editor for easy form customization
- eCommerce compatibility
- Shortcode and widget support for placing search forms anywhere
- Multilingual support compatible with WPML
Things to consider:
- No built-in auto-suggestion features, which could limit user experience.
- Lacks analytics and search query tracking.
WP Search with Algolia
WP Search with Algolia plugin integrates Algolia’s fast and scalable infrastructure for real-time search results, considerable for large sites with high traffic and developers needing advanced customization.
Key features include:
- Integrates the search tool Algolia directly into a WordPress website, using API keys.
- Instant search results: Provides real-time results as users type.
- Autocomplete suggestions: Enhances user experience with predictive text suggestions.
- Customizable search: Allows full customization of search behavior and display.
- Supports multiple content types: Indexes posts, pages, and custom post types.
- Scalable performance: Leverages Algolia’s infrastructure for fast and efficient search, even on large sites.
- Developer-friendly: Offers hooks and filters for further customization.
Things to consider:
- Requires an Algolia account.
- Initial setup might be complex for users without technical knowledge, as it involves API key integration.
WP Extended Search
WP Extended Search plugin is free and open-source. It adds advanced search filters for post titles, content, categories, tags, and metadata. The setup is user-friendly, and the plugin is lightweight, making it suitable for most WordPress sites.
Key features include:
- Advanced search filters: Customize searches across post titles, content, excerpts, metadata, categories, and tags.
- Multiple search combinations: Allows for flexible search criteria configurations.
- Custom post type support: Enables searching across custom content types.
- Exclusion options: Exclude specific content types or posts from search results.
- Easy setup: User-friendly interface for quick configuration.
- Lightweight and fast: Minimal performance impact on site speed.
Things to consider:
- Doesn’t offer real-time or Ajax-based search, limiting responsiveness.
- Limited design customization options for search results display.
- Lacks analytics or search term tracking.
FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce
FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce plugin provides instant product search results with product previews (images, prices, and descriptions) and supports searching by SKU and product attributes.
Key features include:
- Instant product search results: Shows live search results as users type.
- Detailed product previews: Displays product images, prices, and descriptions directly in search results.
- Allows searches by SKU and other WooCommerce product attributes.
- Customizable search box and results: Offers design options to match your site’s styling.
- Filters search results by product categories.
- Mobile optimization: Ensures smooth functionality on mobile devices.
- Tracks and displays search queries data, for insights.
Things to consider:
- Its focus on WooCommerce means it is not that suitable for non-eCommerce websites.
- Analytics are basic compared to more detailed search behavior tracking offered by some of its alternatives.
Side note: These lists are purely informational, based on the available information in October 2024. We do not endorse either of the above mentioned plugins.
Site search plugins lack analytics
As illustrated above, many plugins don’t even offer basic analytic data, since their main focus is to help WordPress site owners implement the search widget and relevant results.
For eg., The JetPack Search FAQ clearly states that “The dashboard does not record the terms your readers use when using the Jetpack Search form on your site (or any other search forms on your site).”
Only a few plugins allow you to track and filter basic search statistics by time period, whether results were found, specific search strings and substrings, etc.
No plugins offer granular insights.
Site owners need supporting data along with basic site search analytics to be able to draw a complete picture of the user journey––from searching to converting––and make real business decisions.
Site search data coupled with other important data, like:
- Geographical data (where particular searches came from)
- Conversion data (whether a search resulted in a purchase/add-to-cart/wishlist or not)
- Total traffic data
- Visit duration data
- Landing pages visited data
- Entry and Exit pages data
- Devices, operating systems, browsers data
- etc.,
…is the best kind of data.
It provides you with all the necessary information –– an end-to-end view from search terms to conversions –– to make important business decisions. It’s like SEO, but internally for your site.
Therefore, you need a analytics plugin in your WordPress toolkit.
Plausible WordPress plugin for accurate site search and web analytics
Plausible Analytics is a lightweight, super-simple, web analytics plugin for WordPress. The best part is that all it takes is one click to enable site search terms tracking.
Plausible works regardless of the site search plugin or WordPress theme or custom code you use. If there’s a search happening on your site, with the help of any technology, Plausible can track and display the data for you.
Features in the Plausible WordPress plugin
- Track any and all search terms used on your site.
- See how many search results are generated for each search term your visitors use.
- Link site searches to any important business goals.
- Track data from any search plugin you use.
- Easy, single-page dashboard.
- Minimal development. Up in minutes.
- Updated regularly.
Plausible is more powerful than Google Analytics, for site search tracking and other data
Google Analytics 4 also offers site search tracking as an enhanced measurement. But Plausible is better at it for the following reasons.
Showing the number of search results generated
Plausible Analytics plugin can show you how many search results are generated for each search term your visitors use. For eg., If a visitor searches for “paid ads guide” on your top marketing articles compilation site, the plugin can tell you that the search returned 20 results.
GA4 does not have this capability.
Comparing site search data with regular traffic
In Plausible, you get a single dashboard with all your traffic data. For site search data, you simply add it as a filter in the same dashboard and see a holistic view.
In Google Analytics, if you want to compare total sessions with the ones that had searches, you need to build two different cohorts/audience segments in a complex settings panel: “Sessions with site search” and “sessions without site search”, then utilize it all as dimensions in a Free Form report to start analyzing data.
Ease of reporting
To be able to see a simple site search report, you need to first build a complex Free Form report, understanding and choosing from different dimensions and adding them correctly.
Similarly, joining site search data with other useful data like conversion data, landing pages visited data, or SEO data is more cumbersome in Google Analytics 4, requiring either creating an even more unnecessarily complex Free Form report from scratch, or switching between this Free Form report and Traffic and User Acquisition reports, hidden beneath layers of menus.
While doing that, you also need to ensure that Google Tag Manager settings are at par, with all the parameters in place with proper character limits.
In Plausible, the site search tracking setup is basically one toggle, and the analysis happens on a single-page, user-friendly report, with even more accurate insights and less cumbersome work than GA4.
Even the SEO data (directly sourced from Google Search Console), channels acquisition data (i.e., the “Traffic Acquisition” report in GA4), pages data, and all the other data is available on one single page report.
Plausible provides more accurate insights because our script doesn’t require a consent banner setup, while GA4 does and consent banner declines cause a data loss of 55%, in comparison to Plausible.
Plausible Analytics is a simpler alternative to Google Analytics 4. We:
- Are more accurate
- Are lightweight
- Block bot traffic by default
- Are less blocked by ad blockers and privacy-first browsers
- have compliances in-built, no consent banner needed
- Are open-source and privacy-first, and more accepted by aware end-users
Getting started with the Plausible plugin
Get started with Plausible Analytics by creating a free account. You can test all features with a 30-day trial, with no credit card required. Just sign up with your name and email—it’s quick and easy.
While this account can be used on any website, we recommend using our official WordPress plugin for a much easier and quicker installation. For doing so, head over to your WordPress dashboard and follow the following steps.
- Go into the “Plugins” section in the left-hand side navigation and click on “Add New.”
- In the search box, type “Plausible Analytics” and press enter.
- Click the “Install Now” button on the listing of our official “Plausible Analytics” plugin. After the installation is finished, click “Activate.”
- Next, you’ll be guided through our setup tutorial to configure the plugin and its various options.
- You’ll also find a ‘Plausible Analytics’ entry in the ‘Settings’ menu on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard. Click it to explore more features.
- In the ‘Domain Name’ field, enter the same domain from your Plausible account, but remove ‘https’ and ‘www’ (e.g., yourdomain.com).
- Back in Plausible site settings, generate a plugin token and paste it into the ‘Plugin Token’ field in the plugin settings. This lets you manage everything directly in the WordPress plugin.
We explain these steps, along with other useful settings than just site search tracking, in more detail in our official WordPress plugin guide.
This way, you will ensure that the supporting data, like conversion data, effective marketing channels, traffic, geographies, etc., start collecting. Meanwhile, turn on site search tracking.
Enable site search tracking with a switch
In the “Enhanced measurements” section of the Plausible WordPress plugin settings, enable the “Search queries” option.
That’s it. Your site search tracking is activated, with no additional action required.
Now, whenever a search takes place in your site, it will be visible in your Plausible and WordPress dashboard along with the data on what was searched, how many times out of total traffic, how many results were displayed, conversion rate, etc. Let’s explore this in more detail below.
Plausible in action
You can feel the Plausible experience by visiting our live demo link, where our website’s statistics are completely, publicly available.
Next, let’s understand how to use your Plausible dashboard for understanding the site search data. You can also have a look at our list of best practices to ensure a fully functioning Plausible dashboard.
Filter Plausible dashboard by “Goal is WP Search Queries”
When you turn on the “Search Queries” setting in your WordPress plugin settings as explained above, search term tracking is auto-implemented as a goal in Plausible by the name of “WP Search Queries.” You can edit this display name though.
You can click on this entry from the “Goals” section of the dashboard or use the Filter option to segment your dashboard by this goal only. Once done, you will be able to view:
- Unique visitors vs unique & total conversions, with conversion rate. Since “WP Seach Queries” is implemented as a goal, the conversion in this context means that successful searches were conducted.
- Other data related to the activity that took place during the sessions in which searches were done.
- The exact search queries (case-sensitive) that took place. These queries are auto-implemented in the form of custom properties, so no additional setup is needed on your end.
How to read this report?
In the year so far, we had 32 unique visitors, out of which 3 visitors searched for something on the site 8 times. They all came from Direct sources. They exited the website from different pages (details mentioned). They came from the mentioned cities and used the mentioned browsers. They searched for “tshirt”, “Hoodie” and “hoodie.”
That’s the insight you get in an instant. Furthermore, you can go as deep as needed by clicking on any entry in this report. Let’s say you want to see the specific data for the search term: “tshirt.”
See related analytics for a particular search term
Now you can simply click on the entry “tshirt”, or use the Filter feature. This way, all the data in the report will be related to “tshirts” searches only: the marketing acquisition channels, the geographical data, the top/entry/exit pages, and everything else.
If you want to see if tshirts lead to an actual purchase on the site, you can visualize that with the help of funnels.
P.S. The funnel in this example has been setup for a demo WooCommerce store. If you actually use WooCommerce, check out here how to enable your store’s tracking in a single click, with our WordPress plugin.
Apart from completing purchases, you can track any goal related to the search term. A goal can be anything for your website: a successful purchase, a newsletter subscription, a product sign-up, event sign-up, wishlisting of items, etc. And any of that can be tracked from successful site searches to meeting that goal!
Some more tips
- Create audience segments with the help of filtering options, to save answers to particular business questions.
- Export the search statistics as a CSV file.
- Link Google Search Console with Plausible to understand search data from Google, in addition to on-site search as well.
Get started and install the plugin for free now We are waiting to see what you do with it!