You can track almost any activity you want on your site with modern web analytics tools. And the process has only gotten simpler during the last decade.

It’s now extremely affordable and easy to track anything and everything you want for your website. Plus, the need for making “data-driven decisions” has never been higher.

This has caused a “metric-overload.” The excitement to get to track everything takes away from the clarity and value of useful metrics. It’s even worse if the site owner is already confused about the site’s purpose.

Many sites track too many metrics. If some metrics seem to be performing bad, the next action is to add a few more metrics. 

But extra metrics doesn’t always mean extra insights –– but in many cases, more confusion. In other words, this gives the illusion of doing something right in the online world but actually counts for more motion and less movement.

The question, though, is which metrics are actually useful for a website to track. This begs for the fundamental question to be resurfaced: what is the purpose of analytics? And how to decide which ones to track for your website.

1. What is the purpose of analytics?
   1. What are metrics?
2. What is the purpose of my website?
3. Which metrics do we track at Plausible and why?
4. Tips for choosing the right metrics
   1. Don’t track everything
   2. Align metrics with individual team’s goals
   3. Track metrics over time
   4. Keep it simple
5. Mission drives metrics

What is the purpose of analytics?

Analytics exists to show light in a dark and confusing room. It exists to show facts: the health of a website (and to an extent, the business or entity with the website) and bring objectivity to help create any strategies. 

It is to turn complex and unorganized data into useful information, i.e., to simplify complex stuff and eventually create the most effective and actionable strategy. Strategy to reach an end-goal, which is usually earning money, but websites can still (and usually do) have different purposes as we will see below.

What are metrics?

Metrics are the things you see on your dashboard. Anything that can be measured on your site is a metric. For eg. pageviews, bounce rate, exit rate, conversions, conversion rate, screen size, etc.

For a fuller overview, you can see the list of metrics our subscribers track with Plausible.

What is the purpose of my website?

In a typical website, there are far too many things that can be tracked: which buttons were clicked, how much time was spent on which page, which conversions occurred, which forms were filled, if the light or dark mode was enabled, which browser was the traffic from Germany using, if the traffic from Reddit signed up for the newsletter, and endless more.

It’s not about tracking everything. It’s about tracking the right things that align with your website’s purpose. If you end up tracking a lot, it defeats the purpose of analytics and causes more confusion than clarity.

So take time to think about what your website is meant to do and match that purpose with that of analytics.

For eg., The purpose of the website of an educational institution is to provide learning materials, communicate with students, and offer online courses. So their performance metrics can be:

• Enrollment rate: Percentage of site visitors who enroll in courses.
• Course completion rate: Percentage of students completing online courses. (if relevant)
• Bounce rate: Visitors who leave after visiting only one page (important for course pages).
• User engagement: Time spent on learning resources or tutorials.
• Return visitors: Students returning for more content or courses.

This is quite contrasting to an e-commerce website. Its purpose is to help consumers browse, research, and purchase products or services. So it makes sense for them to track the following:

• Conversion rate: Percentage of visitors who make a purchase.
• Cart abandonment rate: Percentage of visitors who add items to their cart but don’t complete the purchase.
• Average Order Value (AOV): The average value of each order placed.
• Traffic sources: Identifying where visitors are coming from (paid ads, organic search, etc.).
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): How much revenue a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime.

Even the most complex businesses can be reduced to a high-level simple definition. It may help to start there.

Even better: if you know what your mission as an entity is (for eg. it’s Plausible’s mission to spread privacy-friendly and simple analytics).

Here are a few more examples to get you thinking:

• A service-based business might focus on tracking contact form submissions, appointment bookings, or phone calls to measure interest in their offerings.
• A nonprofit organization could prioritize tracking donations, volunteer sign-ups, or petition submissions to measure support for their cause.
• An educational website might track course enrollments, student progress, or the completion rate of online modules.
• A portfolio website for creatives may want to measure the number of views on specific projects, inquiries for services, or downloads of resumes or portfolios.
• A news or media website might track page views, ad revenue, and social media shares to gauge the popularity of articles and overall site traffic.
• A membership site could focus on tracking membership sign-ups, retention rates, or content engagement from members.
• A community-based website may prioritize metrics like forum activity, member interactions, or event participation to gauge user involvement and community growth.

Every other metric is simply noise, unless there’s a good purpose to track it. For eg., it’s okay to track how many mobile users an e-commerce site has if you plan to make a mobile application for it.

Purposeful metrics will bring clarity, and others can distract you from the main goal. Let’s take Plausible’s case.

Which metrics do we track at Plausible and why?

We are an analytics tool ourselves and it is the easiest for us to track whatever we want but we keep it limited to only a handful of metrics, as is visible in our live dashboard.

Our marketing philosophy and bias towards simplicity play as anchors in deciding what to track. Our marketing philosophy is to create content that:

1. Educates new people about privacy-friendly analytics and that a solution like Plausible exists, and
2. Keeps our existing stakeholders informed.

We don’t exactly do any lead nurturing, promos or retention programs for example. That’s because we believe once the person has been aptly informed about Plausible and privacy-friendly analytics, our job is more or less done.

No more tactics are needed to nurture the people and “feed the metrics” for a short-term illusion of success. Meanwhile, we try to take care of things like retention with the highest quality of product and support.

This helps us decide on which metrics to track, and more importantly what not to track.

For instance: in order to follow our mission and marketing philosophy, we have some core pages on our site: the Plausible vs Google Analytics page, simple analytics, in-built compliance with privacy laws, our privacy-first nature, high accuracy of analytics, etc. Basically it’s everything in our site’s navbar and footer.

So we see if the unique views on these pages are increasing over time, and if the time on page remains adequately high. If it’s not the case, we can analyze the reasons with the dashboard’s help and take corrective actions as necessary.

We also need to understand how many sign ups we get, as that too is tied to our mission of spreading privacy-first analytics and helps measure the progress as a business. So we track it as a goal in Plausible.

But we have never tracked our pricing section for example. Similarly, we don’t track which of the “Get started” buttons on the homepage brings the most registrations. 

We could and it would be a nice to know information but that doesn’t help us because it’s comparatively trivial to the other main metrics that help us keep simplicity and clarity. And that is exactly the kind of noise site owners should cut out.

It may be helpful to start looking at the following tips.

Tips for choosing the right metrics

Don’t track everything

If you track too many things, especially without purpose, it can lead to “analysis paralysis.” It’s the feeling of being overwhelmed with data (rather, being trapped in an endless maze of data) and not knowing what to do with it.

Doing it might show you a lot of activity, but what’s it all telling you? Tracking too many metrics can distract you from your main goal.

Instead, focus on a few key metrics that truly reflect your website’s performance and health. For example, if you are a Health and Wellness website, its purpose can be to share fitness plans, nutrition advice, and wellness tips. So, only track the following:

• Page views: Number of visits to specific health or wellness articles.
• Conversion rate: Sign-ups for fitness plans, consultations, or online sessions.
• Social media referrals: Frequency of the site’s content being shared on social media and how much traffic it brings.

Align metrics with individual team’s goals

Each part of your business will have different priorities. For example:

• Marketing might want to track traffic sources and campaign performance, like how many visitors come from ads or social media.
• Sales teams might care about conversion rates—how many visitors turn into paying customers.
• Customer service might want to know how many people contact you for help or leave reviews.

It’s okay to track it all from a single dashboard as long as internal clarity is present and they all connect back to overall business goals. This also keeps everyone aligned and focused on what matters most.

A good rule of thumb is: if your web analytics tool only allowed for the three most important metrics to be tracked, what would you pick?

Track metrics over time

One of the most important things to remember is that metrics should be tracked over time, not just on a single day or week. Trends are often more valuable than isolated data points.

For example, tracking how page views on your site increase over several months tells you if your content is becoming more popular. A sudden drop in traffic might tell you there’s a problem, but understanding these patterns over time helps you spot opportunities or risks early.

Keep it simple

In the end, simplicity is key. Choose a small set of important metrics that will give you the clearest picture of your website’s performance. Simple metrics will attract simple clarity and actionable strategies.

You can always adjust or add more metrics as you grow, but start simple and build from there.

Mission drives metrics

Do you have a web analytics tool on your website? Why? What according to you is important to track on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis? If your answer is just revenue, think again. Think about the website’s purpose from your customers’ perspective.

Do you track some metrics because everyone does or do they serve a purpose? Is it form submission rates? Time on page? Or exit rates? Why? What can be cut from this?

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.

1. Analyzing Plausible’s AI search traffic boost in 2024
   1. Figuring out where AI chats mention Plausible and send traffic
      1. Isn’t there a better way to track my brand’s visibility across AI search tools?
   2. Was this “qualified” traffic?
      1. What did they do on the site?
      2. Were any conversions met from this?
   3. When?
   4. How do we approach content and marketing at Plausible that may have helped with this AI traffic boost?
2. What can you really do?
   1. Identify your low hanging fruits
   2. Focus on those AI channels that cite the most.
   3. Get better at SEO – but the way Google looks at it
   4. Consider adding an llms.txt file
   5. Write content for citation and reference purposes
   6. Cover topics well 
   7. Optimize for natural language and voice search
3. 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.

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.

1. Quick revision: Standard vs Custom reports in Google Analytics 4
2. Finding insights in GA4 vs Plausible
   1. How many people visit my site and how well they engage?
      1. In Plausible
      2. In GA4
   2. The pages from where people leave my site?
      1. In Plausible
      2. In GA4
   3. How many conversions were acquired from which source, page, city, device, etc.?
      1. In Plausible
      2. In GA4
   4. Segmentation of audiences
      1. In Plausible
      2. In GA4
   5. What’s happening on the website in real-time?
      1. In Plausible
      2. In GA4
   6. Other things
      1. Traffic acquisition report
      2. Demographic and tech reports
      3. Entry Pages report
      4. Custom dimensions
3. 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.

1. What’s wrong with Google Analytics?
   1. Why choose Plausible Analytics over Google Analytics?
2. Setup and track your paid campaigns with Plausible
   1. Tagging URLs in Google Ads
      1. Using auto-tagging in Google Ads
      2. Manually tagging links with UTM parameters
   2. Tracking campaign performance in Plausible
3. Using Google Ads with a privacy-first analytics tool
   1. Importing Plausible goals into Google Ads
   2. Running retargeting campaigns
4. 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:

1. Consent banners: Google Analytics requires a consent banner. If visitors decline, their sessions cannot be tracked.
2. 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.

1. Lightweight script: Plausible’s tracking script is at least 75x smaller than GA4’s, not slowing down your sit
2. Simple dashboard: No complex menus—just effective, actionable insights.
3. Privacy-friendly by design: Plausible doesn’t require a cookie consent banner because it doesn’t track or store personal data.
4. 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.

1. Navigate to “Campaigns” from the left sidebar -> “Ads”
2. Select the ad you want to edit or create a new ad.
3. Paste the UTM-tagged URL into the Final URL field.
4. 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:

1. Filter campaign data: Use the Campaigns tab to isolate specific traffic sources, mediums, or campaigns (e.g., utm_campaign=holiday_sale).
2. 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.
3. 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.

1. Understanding Bounce Rate
   1. Bounce rate formula
   2. Bounce rate vs Engagement rate vs Exit rate
2. What is considered a good bounce rate in 2025?
   1. Bounce rate benchmarks by industry (in descending order)
      1. Content websites and pages: 65% - 90%
      2. Landing pages: 60% - 90%
      3. Service industry websites (Legal, Automotive, etc.): 50% - 70%
      4. B2B websites: 25% - 65%
      5. Travel and Hospitality: 40% - 60%
      6. Real Estate: 30% - 55%
      7. Retail & eCommerce websites: 20% - 55%
   2. A rule of thumb to go by
3. How to check my website’s Bounce rate?
4. Interpreting bounce rate data
   1. Segment bounce rate by pages
   2. Segment bounce rate by traffic sources
   3. Segment bounce rate by locations and devices
   4. Segment bounce rate by custom properties
5. How to decrease your bounce rate?
   1. Use relevant and engaging content
   2. Know your audience
   3. Make your site fast and mobile-friendly
   4. Avoid too many popups
   5. Match the page to visitor intent
   6. Maintain a good site structure
   7. Run experiments
6. 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.

1. What is a landing page?
2. How do I see the pages with most traffic, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, etc.?
   1. Top, Entry and Exit pages
   2. Filter and segment entries
   3. Special cases and best practices
      1. Shield specific traffic from being recorded
      2. View combined Pages reports for multiple sites
      3. Retain query parameters in a URL
      4. Shield sensitive information from URLs
      5. Avoid trailing Slash Discrepancies
      6. Track Single-Page Applications (SPA) and URL Hashes
3. How to use this information as a site owner?
   1. Identify what’s attracting or throwing off visitors
   2. Assess the impact of marketing campaigns
   3. Improve UX on entry pages
   4. Optimize low-performing pages
   5. Spot opportunities for conversion
   6. Do content planning

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:

1. Top Pages – to analyze the pages with the most visitors. 
2. Entry Pages – to analyze the pages where visitors first land on your site.
3. 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.

1. What are categories in WordPress posts?
2. What is the difference between categories and tags in WordPress?
3. How to add categories to your WordPress posts?
   1. How to edit or delete categories?
   2. What happens to posts or pages associated with a category that is deleted in WordPress?
   3. How to convert categories to tags?
   4. How to add categories to a menu?
4. WordPress plugins to enhance and simplify category management
   1. TaxoPress
   2. Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order
   3. No Category Base (WPML)
   4. Media Library Categories
   5. Real Category Management: Content Management in Category Folders
   6. List category posts
5. How to decide on the perfect categories for your posts?
   1. Examples of categories
6. Tracking the performance of your categories
   1. Is Plausible worth it?

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:

1. 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.

2. 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:

1. Find what they were looking for, i.e. do you even offer what they are searching for?
2. 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.

1. Implementing site search in WordPress
   1. SearchWP Live Ajax Search
   2. Ivory Search
   3. Relevanssi
   4. Ajax Search Lite
   5. Jetpack Search
   6. Better Search
   7. Search & Filter
   8. WP Search with Algolia
   9. WP Extended Search
   10. FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce
2. Site search plugins lack analytics
3. Plausible WordPress plugin for accurate site search and web analytics
   1. Features in the Plausible WordPress plugin
   2. Plausible is more powerful than Google Analytics, for site search tracking and other data
      1. Showing the number of search results generated
      2. Comparing site search data with regular traffic
      3. Ease of reporting
4. Getting started with the Plausible plugin
   1. Enable site search tracking with a switch
5. Plausible in action
   1. Filter Plausible dashboard by “Goal is WP Search Queries”
   2. See related analytics for a particular search term
6. 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!

Tracking the performance of your WooCommerce store doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it’s incredibly straightforward with the Plausible plugin for WordPress, allowing you to set up end-to-end ecommerce site monitoring with just one click.

You will be able to track most ecommerce analytics, right on your WordPress dashboard (or Plausible dashboard, if you prefer). Analytics like:

• Which products sell the most and the least, and why?
• Which marketing channels generate the highest traffic and sales—search, social media, email, ads, or someplace else—so you can focus your efforts on the most effective ones.
• User behavior to spot where your website loses potential revenue.
• Total sales and revenue by category, over time.
• Average order value (AOV).
• Refund and return rates, cart abandonment rates and recovery opportunities.
• How many unique visitors visit the store and how much time do they spend there.
• Conversion rates such as the percentage of visitors who make a purchase, or wishlist a particular product type, or conversion rates by traffic source.
• Buyer journeys, i.e. how customers move from finding your store to checking out (funnel analysis).
• Fast-moving vs. slow-moving products.
• Where your customers are located geographically and which regions show demand for specific products.

…and more.

Such insights can help you learn better about your customer behavior, optimize your marketing and customer experience, improve product offerings, optimize the website, and maximize sales and revenue.

Or in other words, they help you get a birds-eye view of all the possible data to improve your ecommerce site’s performance.

P.S. You can take a quick look at Plausible’s live demo, where we show our own website’s real stats, to see what you’ll get in an active Plausible dashboard.

1. How does Plausible Analytics compare to Google Analytics for WooCommerce tracking?
   1. Easy vs complex setup and analysis, for the same insights
   2. GA4 loses a LOT of accurate data. Plausible is built on accurate data only.
   3. GA4 is not GDPR-compliant. Plausible is built in the EU itself.
   4. GA4 will slow down your ecommerce site. Plausible will not.
2. In-built WooCommerce Analytics
3. How to install the Plausible Analytics plugin for WooCommerce?
4. One-click setup of ecommerce goals, properties, and purchase funnel
5. Additional ecommerce site tracking with Plausible
   1. Additional features of the plausible plugin for WooCommerce
   2. Additional store tracking with your Plausible account
   3. Best practices for using Plausible Analytics for WooCommerce
6. Answering key ecommerce questions with Plausible Analytics
   1. What are my store’s conversion rates and how can I improve them?
   2. Which marketing channels are driving the most sales?
   3. How can I minimize cart abandonment?
   4. What are my store’s engagement levels?
   5. How can I manage my refund and return rates?
7. Quick recap

How does Plausible Analytics compare to Google Analytics for WooCommerce tracking?

Traditionally, Google Analytics has been the go-to tool for this purpose. But it requires a deeply technical and complex setup, loses a lot of accurate data due to being blocked by many ad blockers, missing bot protection and consent banner declines, and is not GDPR-compliant. 

Plausible Analytics is a powerful alternative that is lightweight, easy to use, and privacy-friendly.

Let’s see:

Easy vs complex setup and analysis, for the same insights

On visiting the official Google Analytics for WooCommerce plugin page, you will find many recent reviews of how the new version hasn’t been working for months, how it slows down the WooCommerce site, doesn’t even integrate well with GA4, is not compliant with GDPR, etc.

They have an average rating of 2.8 stars:

On the other hand, the official Plausible plugin page is used on more than 10k WordPress sites, with an average rating of 4.9 stars:

This means that if Google Analytics 4 is your choice, you will need to manually set everything up since its WooCommerce plugin is not reliable.

And a manual Google Analytics 4 setup for ecommerce typically involves collaborating with a developer to send necessary ecommerce events (eg: “purchase”), text and numerical parameters (eg: “currency”, “transaction-ID”, “coupon”, etc.) to the data layer in Google Tag Manager (while taking care of character limits), followed by testing everything through the DebugView, configuring events, custom dimensions, metrics, etc. in the GA4 UI, and even building your reports from scratch using the Free Form functionality. Phew.

We, at Plausible, know pretty much about web analytics and even we wouldn’t want to do all that. That, by the way, is why we built Plausible in the first place.

GA4 loses a LOT of accurate data. Plausible is built on accurate data only.

Imagine going through all the trouble of setting up Google Analytics 4 as described above and still ending up with half-accurate data. A recent independent study done by a marketing and analytics expert found that the amount of data missing from GA4, in comparison to Plausible, can be as much as 55%.

This mainly happens due to privacy-conscious individuals who decline cookie consent banners, have ad blockers in place, and use privacy-respecting browsers like Safari and Firefox –– all of which block the Google Analytics script from firing and not recording data.

Secondly, Google Analytics fails to protect your site from bot traffic. You’d need to do some manual work to exclude that in Google Analytics 4 as well. Plausible blocks ~32K known data center IP ranges (i.e. a lot of bot IP addresses) by default. We offer bot protection out-of-the-box.

GA4 is not GDPR-compliant. Plausible is built in the EU itself.

Several European DPAs have claimed that Google Analytics is not legal to use. Google Analytics tracks and stores a lot of personal data and it is a potential legal liability for your site, and a risky trust factor with your customers and other stakeholders.

This forces Google Analytics users to implement cookie banners and provide a bad site experience to their visitors. With Plausible, we don’t use cookies to track your users outside your site, and therefore have in-built compliance with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, PECR, etc.

You can ditch cookie consent banners, from our side. Please don’t take this as official legal advice, though. It is crucial to consult with your local lawyers to understand compliances that apply to you and meet them for your particular region.

GA4 will slow down your ecommerce site. Plausible will not.

The recommended GA4 implementation with Google Tag Manager uses a JavaScript file that is much heavier than that of Plausible. If you use GTag and not GTM, the difference is even bigger. We have a detailed study of this here.

Slower stores are bad for SEO, site experience, cart abandonment, and whatnot. The Plausible script is lightweight: practically incapable of slowing down any site.

In-built WooCommerce Analytics

WooCommerce account comes with some in-built reporting for tracking basic ecommerce metrics like sales, orders, refunds, taxes, shipping, etc. The main difference between this reporting and a web analytics plugin like Plausible is that you can also do the following with Plausible:

• You can also track traffic to pages, and where they come from (social, ads, emails, etc.). 
• You can track the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns like an organic social media campaign, a Google Ads campaign, SEO, etc. and directly link them to sales.
• You can track other metrics like bounce rate, visit duration, pages visited on your website, devices used, users’ countries and regions, etc.
• You can visualize the end-to-end user journey from discovering your product or brand to completing a checkout. You can build purchase funnels on Plausible. With this understanding of customers’ behavior and preferences, and where the funnel is leaking, you can take corrective action to improve sales.
• You can track anything you want (like  on your website through custom events, beyond the standard events provided by the in-house WooCommerce analytics.
• Plausible has an extremely simple and convenient dashboard, with none other like it in the industry. There’s the added benefit of not having to use cookie banners, and never counting bots (only real traffic).
• Get done with an otherwise technical setup in a single click, as we show below.

In short, you not only track some ecommerce business metrics, but also get a holistic view of your website’s and marketing campaigns’ performance, opening up opportunities to improve them.

How to install the Plausible Analytics plugin for WooCommerce?

You need two active accounts for a functioning store and analytics:

• An active store with WooCommerce (WordPress-based ecommerce manager),
• An active account with Plausible (we have a 30-day free trial, in case you’re yet to try it out).

To start using the Plausible plugin, visit your WordPress dashboard and open the “Plugins” section. Click on “Add New,” and search for “Plausible Analytics.”

Then, click the “Install Now” button, followed by clicking the “Activate” button. Follow the on-screen guide to finish your set up. We have more detailed instructions on this here.

Your web analytics are now active! You’ll be able to view this both in your Plausible account and WordPress dashboard. Here’s what it looks like within WordPress:

One-click setup of ecommerce goals, properties, and purchase funnel

Coming to the most fun part. It’s time to witness magic. With a raw Plausible dashboard, you generally need to manually set up custom events, custom properties (i.e. what’s called custom dimensions in Google Analytics 4), and funnels.

This can be a lengthy task for ecommerce site owners because it involves having a clear understanding of what all should be tracked, followed by tagging those events and properties, making some code changes, and configuring a funnel.

We anticipated this requirement of ecommerce store owners and did all that by default instead! All you gotta do is turn on “Ecommerce revenue” on the Settings page of your Plausible plugin inside WordPress.

It’s smooth as butter and takes less than 30 seconds:

With this feature, you can track the following custom events automatically:

• Complete Purchase: Records a conversion along with its revenue earned in Plausible whenever a purchase is completed on your WooCommerce store.
• Start Checkout: Records an event whenever someone starts a checkout, regardless of whether they complete it or not (helps with understanding checkout abandonment rates).
• Add to Cart: Records an event whenever someone adds an item to their cart (helps with understanding cart filling and abandonment rates).
• Visit /product*: WooCommerce stores generally have their product pages on the path: `URL/product/example product`. This kind of a pageview goal helps in tracking product views and their related metrics.
• Remove from Cart: Records an event whenever someone removes an item from their cart.

Secondly, you can track the following custom properties automatically. 

For context, custom properties are additional contextual information about custom events.

For eg. If “Add to cart” is an event, then “product name” and “quantity” can be its custom properties. This helps build a complete picture of what was added to the cart.

• cart_total
• cart_total_items
• id
• name
• price
• product_id
• product_name
• quantity
• shipping
• subtotal
• subtotal_tax
• tax_class
• total
• total_tax
• variation_id

On top of this, a 4-step ecommerce purchase funnel is created automatically for you. This helps understand the user journey from viewing a product, to adding to cart, to starting checkout and finally to completing a purchase (notice the “Woo purchase funnel” in the gif above?).

This funnel also helps see the drop-off rates between these progressive steps and understand where and what to optimize to maximize sales.

No coding required, one-click event and funnel tracking, and instant access to data. That’s Plausible Analytics for you! Of course, you can set up more events and other things easily as well. Let’s see. 

Additional ecommerce site tracking with Plausible

You will find a bunch of more settings on the Settings page of your Plausible Analytics plugin inside WordPress.

Additional features of the plausible plugin for WooCommerce

You can utilize other “Enhanced Measurements” and additional settings, as listed on the Plausible plugin Settings page inside WordPress.

Such examples include tracking site search terms, 404 error pages, outbound clicks, etc. We highly recommend going through our detailed plugin overview here, where we explain each setting and more.

Additional store tracking with your Plausible account

You can track other ecommerce events, pageview goals, properties, funnels, and anything at all for your ecommerce website. If you don’t see a specific plugin setting for your use case in the detailed overview linked above, you can likely track it using your Plausible account.

For eg., if you want to track the clicks to your mobile app download button, it can be done using either of custom event goals or pageview goals in Plausible.

Your Plausible account functions just like any standard account, giving you access to all regular features. For a complete overview and to adjust any necessary settings, check the Plausible Docs. Or, reach out to [email protected].

Best practices for using Plausible Analytics for WooCommerce

We recommend implementing the following practices, as applicable, to ensure an optimal and highly functional setup.

Tag your URLs with referral sources or UTM tagging, whenever using them in your ads, socials, emails, or anywhere else. This practice will reduce the traffic categorized as Direct/Unknown and provide clearer insights into your traffic sources and channels. This can later be filtered by your revenue-synced goals, revealing your top performing marketing channels.

Connect Plausible with your Google Search Console account to get an overview of the top performing keywords that bring your traffic from Google. This will help you understand how well your content and SEO contribute to traffic, sales and other goals.

Import historical GA4 data, if you are making a switch from a Google Analytics 4 account to a Plausible account for tracking your ecommerce analytics.

Track revenue with money-making goals like completing purchases. Although, this is an automatically implemented goal in Plausible as explained above, if there are other things that bring revenue to you, utilize such revenue-synced goals. For eg., if you conduct exclusive ticketed product reveal events, then you can track the sales of these tickets with revenue goals as well.

Create audience segments by using filtering options in Plausible. This can help answer specific business questions. A few examples: How many buyers came from SEO activities?, or Which of our products are the most popular in Spain?, or Which pages are viewed the most on mobile?, etc. Talking of key business insights, there are multiple ways Plausible can help answer those. Let us see.

Answering key ecommerce questions with Plausible Analytics

Below are some of the most common use cases we have seen for ecommerce site owners, and how Plausible can help address them.

What are my store’s conversion rates and how can I improve them?

Conversion rates—such as purchases, adds-to-cart, and other events—help you understand how many visitors are taking key actions. And therefore, helps with ideas and strategies on optimizing your site for more sales and other conversions.

Here’s a simple example. Upon turning on “Ecommerce revenue” enhanced measurement, the goal of “Add to cart” and the property of “product name” are automatically added to the Plausible setup, among other things.

Assume you sell beanies. It will be automatically tracked as a product name property. 

So if you had to find out how many of those have been added to cart till date, you could apply two filters on the Plausible dashboard: “Goal is Woo Add to Cart” and “Property product_name is Beanie”.

This shows that 4 out 29 unique visitors (a 13.8% conversion rate) have added beanies to their carts till date. 

This data is accompanied by other key information (which also got filtered by sessions in which conversions occurred) such as traffic acquisition sources, top pages visited, countries where conversions took place, devices used, and additional details.

This is also useful in strategic planning. For example, it is seen that Belgium, India, and the Netherlands showed interest in beanies. So you could experiment with advertising campaigns for these countries. 

Or that all of the traffic is received on the desktop version, so a mobile site or mobile app may not be a priority for the business right now.

Pro tip: These insights can be further broken down, by clicking the “Details” option.

Which marketing channels are driving the most sales?

Knowing which marketing efforts are paying off helps with optimizing ad spend and other marketing campaigns. Plausible automatically tracks the performance of various marketing channels, like social media, email, paid ads, organic search, referring site, etc.

This is possible as Plausible automatically takes the referral tag from links that bring you traffic. But if you tag URLs with UTM parameters, you can further break down your traffic sources by UTM campaigns, terms, etc., and monitor the conversion rate for each channel.

This data is available in your “Top Sources” report and clicking on any entry of that report filters your entire dashboard by that traffic acquisition channel.

This allows you to:

• Understand which channels are driving the most traffic and revenue.
• Analyze which marketing efforts result in repeat purchases vs. attracting new customers.

With this, you can make data-driven decisions on where to focus your marketing budget, scaling the channels that bring in the most profitable traffic and cutting those that underperform.

How can I minimize cart abandonment?

Cart abandonment is a common challenge for online stores. Plausible’s built-in event tracking helps you monitor where users abandon the cart and helps in analyzing potential reasons.

Using the Start Checkout and Add to Cart events, you can analyze:

• At which point in the checkout process users are abandoning their cart (e.g., after shipping costs are displayed).
• Which products are most frequently abandoned, helping you spot potential pricing or product page issues.

This data can help you test various solutions like offering free shipping, simplifying the checkout process, or adding reminders for abandoned carts to win back potential customers.

What are my store’s engagement levels?

Beyond product-specific tracking, you need a high-level view of how your entire ecommerce site is performing. Plausible gives you clear, real-time insights into:

• Total traffic and page views, including which pages drive the most engagement.
• Average time on site and bounce rates, showing how well your content is resonating with visitors.
• Geographical location of visitors, allowing you to refine location-based promotional offers.

These metrics help you understand not just how many people are visiting your store, but how they are interacting with your content. If certain pages have high bounce rates or low time on site, you can focus on improving those areas to keep visitors engaged.

How can I manage my refund and return rates?

Refunds and returns can significantly impact your bottom line, so it’s important to keep them in check. By adding a custom event for return and refund requests, you can monitor refund rates by product to see if certain items are being returned more often than others.

By identifying such patterns, you can address potential issues with product descriptions, images, or quality, helping to reduce your return rates over time.

Quick recap

Plausible Analytics offers WooCommerce store owners an easy, one-click setup for tracking key ecommerce metrics such as sales, conversions, cart abandonment, marketing performance, and other key insights.

Unlike Google Analytics, Plausible is super simple to set up and use, is GDPR-compliant, and provides accurate, privacy-friendly insights without slowing down your site.

With built-in ecommerce event tracking and an intuitive dashboard, Plausible helps you optimize customer journeys, improve product performance, and scale your marketing efforts — all in just a few clicks.

You could have your ecommerce funnel ready in the next 10 minutes. Try the Plausible for WordPress plugin for free.

You’ve probably seen those pop-ups on websites, sweetly offering you cookies. Those are cookie consent banners.

Cookies are small data files stored on your device or browser by websites or third parties (such as Google Analytics) to remember information about you. They can track details like your behavior, preferences, activities, shopping cart contents, login information, etc.

Some cookies are persistent and can also track visitor’s activity across different sessions, websites, and devices. While some cookies are considered essential for the functioning of the website, others are for marketing or retargeting purposes.

The consent banner appears to inform you about the use of all such types of cookies and to request your permission before these cookies are set, ensuring compliance with various privacy regulations.

These banners give users the choice to accept, reject, or customize the cookies being used on the site. The main purpose is to inform users and allow them control over their data, ensuring transparency and compliance with various privacy laws.

1. Do you need a cookie consent banner on your website?
   1. When do you not need to use cookie consent banners?
   2. When do you need to use cookie consent banners?
   3. But can you avoid the cookie consent banners?
   4. How to make a decision?
2. How to get a consent banner?
3. Deceptive banner designs, and how NOT to maximize your opt-in rates
   1. Hiding the reject button behind layers of options
   2. Nudging the users to click Accept by making it the most prominent button
   3. “Helping” visitors by pre-selecting the choices that work best for them
   4. A persisting consent wall to force the visitor to interact with the banner
   5. Accept by scrolling
   6. Combining the GDPR consent with location or camera prompts
   7. Blocking video embeds from playing until visitors say yes to tracking
   8. Nudging the user again on the next visit after they rejected to give you consent
   9. Not giving the option to withdraw consent 
4. How to design a GDPR-compliant consent banner?
5. Web users are already smart at escaping the wild west of cookie banners
6. So how will you maximize opt-in rates after all?
7. Building a site that doesn’t require a GDPR or cookie consent banner

Do you need a cookie consent banner on your website?

While you should consult the legal advisors in your jurisdiction for ensuring complete compliance and not face any legal troubles, you would need to be compliant with data protection regulations.

Regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are mandatory to be complied with, if you have any visitors from the areas covered by these regulations.

When do you not need to use cookie consent banners?

Consent is not required for using only first-party cookies (cookies set directly by you, with no involvement from third-parties) that are strictly necessary for the operation of the website, such as cookies used for login authentication or security purposes, provided you don’t track, store, process personal data of visitors.

Although, it is generally an ethical and responsible practice to disclose such stuff in the Privacy Policy, anyway.

Please check with your local legal advisors on which exact laws apply in your case, as there can be many nuances based on the countries your visitors come from, where you are registered, etc.

If you do have a cookie consent banner (for reasons we discuss below), such types of cookies are generally exempt and not allowed to be turned off, as you may have noticed.

Another exception to the rule of using consent banners is using inherently GDPR-compliant analytics tools, as we will see below.

When do you need to use cookie consent banners?

If you utilize third-party cookies (which are present if you use Google Analytics), taking either explicit or implicit consent (depending upon the laws) from your website visitors is mandatory. If you utilize first-party cookies and track and store personal data of visitors, cookie consents are still necessary.

Any website that collects data from users residing in regions where GDPR or CCPA apply is required to ask for their consent before collecting, processing, storing their data. Hence, cookie consent banners are implemented.

But can you avoid the cookie consent banners?

The one thing website-owners don’t realize is that consent banners became necessary because several European Data Protection Authorities found out how Google Analytics has been in violation of privacy laws.

The responsibility of being privacy-friendly, in many ways, is cleverly being passed from Google Analytics to its users. If you were to dissociate with Google Analytics, many websites will find that they don’t need to use annoying consent banners anymore.

According to a guide by a data protection lawyer

• the ePrivacy Directive regulates the use of cookies and similar technologies to store or access data on a user’s device. It requires users to provide informed consent before such technologies are used (Art. 5(3)).
• Google Analytics 4 relies on cookies and similar technologies to track detailed user behavior. These technologies require access to the user’s device to store or retrieve data, which means, under Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive, Google Analytics 4 must obtain user consent before use.
• Whereas, Plausible Analytics does not use cookies or similar technologies that store data on the user’s device. It analyzes aggregate data without accessing or storing anything on the device, so no consent is required under Article 5(3).

P.S. This is not official legal advise.

Plausible is GDPR-compliant out of the box. So you can actually ditch consent banners altogether, which not only annoy your visitors, but also cause about 55% data loss, and eventually, business loss.

Plausible is built in the EU itself, does not engage in cross-platform tracking, does not track and store any personally identifiable information, and does not pass on data to third parties.

We analyze website traffic while adhering to the principles of data minimization and economy, in line with privacy regulations. And it is all served on a super simple, easily comprehensible, accurate, single-page dashboard.

How to make a decision?

Establishing your marketing and website analysis goals, while evaluating how much you and your users value privacy, can help you decide which way to go.

For eg. If retargeting ads are your priority, you cannot escape third-party cookies and Google Analytics along with Google Ads is the default choice. Although, they are going to be phased out pretty soon, so plan accordingly.

Similarly, if your target audience consists of privacy-aware individuals like developers, chances are that they would not only reject the cookie banners, but would have other privacy-protecting measures (like ad blockers, privacy-friendly browsers, etc.) in place.

How to get a consent banner?

To get your banner up, you can find an ethical, privacy-respecting, and legally compliant Consent Management Provider of your choice. They will provide you with a JavaScript code snippet to implement on your website, and your consent banner will be up in minutes.

If you are using Google Analytics, you can try out the Consent Mode for controlling how your Google tags adjust based on the consent “status” of your website visitors. Google designed it to make up for your lost data when people reject your cookie banners. 

The heavy downside is that this gives way to key events modeling inside your GA reports, i.e. you won’t be able to see accurate and real data in your reports with no way of differentiating it from modeled data.

Moreover, there have been countless reports of missing data from Google Analytics users after they implemented Google Consent Mode V2. So make sure to make a fully informed decision.

Speaking of Consent Management Providers or CMPs, beware of the dark patterns that can put you in legal trouble and cause your customers to not trust you.

The sad reality is that CMPs don’t see it as their job to follow the privacy regulations. They see it as the responsibility of their users, i.e., you, to respect rules in their jurisdictions.

And since the percentage of people who opt-in to being tracked on the cookie consent banners is usually a key performance indicator in marketing, CMPs focus their sales message on features that help website and business owners optimize the opt-in rate.

For eg. Some CMPs claim that 75% of people say no to giving their consent to be tracked but with some simple design tweaks (essentially, dark patterns), you might get more than 65% of people to say yes.

Deceptive banner designs, and how NOT to maximize your opt-in rates

Most consent management providers have deceptive designs built into their products. Many of those we have tested enable some of the dark patterns as their default choice. Site owners can switch to a less user-friendly option with a click or two.

Why should you care?

• Many such practices are not GDPR and/or CCPA compliant. All this hard work to still stay legally evasive doesn’t make sense.
• They breach customer trust.
• They point to bad user experience. Your website is your online identity. Creating friction for people to browse it is counter-productive.
• They are not true to the intent of privacy.

Even those that provide a user-friendly design as the default allow you with a click or two to configure the banner.

Here are some of the tricks some websites use to get higher opt-in rates for cookie consent banners (and that you should avoid):

Hiding the reject button behind layers of options

You’ve likely encountered banners that only show options like “Accept” or “Customize,” making it difficult for users to reject cookies.

Many people don’t want to be tracked across the web by companies like Google or Facebook, but this tactic hides the “Reject” option deep within customization settings, forcing users to manually opt out of every third-party tracker.

This method counts on the fact that most visitors won’t take the time to customize settings. Most people just interact with the first layer of the banner and click “Accept,” especially when told it will “ensure the best experience.”

Misleading, right? Avoid this practice.

Nudging the users to click Accept by making it the most prominent button

Even if you’re required to include a “Reject” button, some sites try to make it nearly invisible—small, bland, and easy to miss. Meanwhile, the “Accept All” button is big, colorful, and designed to grab attention.

On top of this, some sites use copywriting that nudges users to think accepting cookies is the best choice, using positive, friendly language to suggest rejecting cookies is a bad move.

Such deceptive design should be avoided at all costs.

“Helping” visitors by pre-selecting the choices that work best for them

Some websites pre-select cookie consent options that allow maximum tracking, making it seem like the default or best choice.

The user is led to believe that these settings will “save them time,” when in reality, they are giving away personal data without a second thought.

This practice is misleading and should not be implemented. Respect users’ right to make informed decisions.

A persisting consent wall to force the visitor to interact with the banner

A consent wall can block access to content until a user interacts with it, pressuring them to either accept tracking or leave the site. Some websites prevent users from closing the consent wall, leaving them with no option but to engage.

This practice traps users into making decisions under duress, and it’s not ethical. Always offer a clear, transparent way to manage cookie preferences without blocking content.

Accept by scrolling

Some sites implement a tactic where simply scrolling through the page or interacting with content is considered as consent to track users. This silent consent is misleading and takes advantage of users who might not even realize they’ve given permission.

Consent should always be explicit and informed—scrolling or engaging with content should never count as consent.

Combining the GDPR consent with location or camera prompts

When users try to access certain features, like camera or location services, some websites sneak in GDPR cookie consent requests. The hope is that users won’t notice they are also consenting to being tracked.

This method is underhanded and combines unrelated permissions in a way that confuses users. Always keep consent requests clear and separate from other prompts.

Blocking video embeds from playing until visitors say yes to tracking

Some sites prevent videos or other embedded content from playing unless users give consent to be tracked. This forces visitors into an uncomfortable choice: either give up their privacy or miss out on content.

Avoid holding content hostage to force consent.

Nudging the user again on the next visit after they rejected to give you consent

Some websites don’t take “no” for an answer. If a user rejects consent, they’re asked again the next time they visit. This constant nagging is designed to wear users down, hoping they eventually give in.

Respect users’ decisions—if they say no, don’t keep asking.

Not giving the option to withdraw consent 

After users give consent, some sites deliberately hide any option to withdraw it. This makes it difficult for people to change their minds and opt-out later.

This is deceptive and against the spirit of privacy regulations. Always provide a clear and easy way for users to withdraw their consent if they choose to do so.

How to design a GDPR-compliant consent banner?

Different corporations, legal teams and European countries seem to have slightly different interpretations of the privacy regulations. To be compliant with GDPR, your consent banner needs to meet these requirements:

• Show contextual and non-personalized ads, don’t place any non-functional cookies and don’t track or share any personal data by default.
• You must obtain consent from your visitor before you set a non-functional cookie and before you collect any personal data. Your site shouldn’t load any third-party script, tracker or pixel that collect personal data and share it for non-functional purposes before obtaining consent from the visitor.
• Prompt visitors to receive more personalized and more relevant ads or to be tracked by giving you consent to collect their data.
• You need to be transparent about your plan for data collection and inform the visitor clearly and sufficiently about it. What data do you plan to collect? What purpose do you plan to use this data for? What third-party services are you sharing the data with?
• User consent must be explicit. It can be given by clicking on an “Agree” button, or by placing a checkmark or by pressing a slide switch. It cannot be preselected.
• When you get explicit user consent, proceed as you described to the user. Place those cookies that the user agreed to, collect that data that the user agreed to and share the data that the user agreed to the third-parties user agreed to.
• If the visitor doesn’t actively and explicitly give you consent by either ignoring your prompt or by choosing “Disagree” on the prompt, then you don’t have consent. There are no exceptions. You should not place any non-functional cookies and you should not collect any personal data.

Not getting entangled with sales messages of consent management providers can prevent you from making the mistake of creating non-compliant cookie consent banners.

Web users are already smart at escaping the wild west of cookie banners

Many internet users are aware of their GDPR, CCPA, and other legal rights. Especially with privacy-respecting solutions on the web, they are being more and more preferred. Trying to deceive them with jargon and manipulation is not going to look good on a brand.

For eg. Browsers like Safari and Firefox protect you from the most annoying website elements and it also “confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.”

This means that Google, Facebook and other surveillance capitalism giants cannot follow you as easily when you browse the web even if the website you’re visiting may be using a dark pattern or two to get you to consent.

Organizations like noyb scans, reviews, warns and enforces the law on tens of thousands of websites. They’re showing great success with their warnings and are making a real impact on the choice web users have when browsing websites.

Many of the big websites that noyb has warned have since changed their consent banner to a more user-friendly design. They are doing great work in this space, increasing the awareness about the wild west of cookie consent banners and making the web friendlier to us all.

So how will you maximize opt-in rates after all?

At the end of the day, the goal is to be compliant, privacy-friendly, and loyal to your customers. Therefore, optimizing a cookie consent banner (at least not in the deceptive ways described above) is not going to be equivalent to optimizing opt-in rates.

When designing your consent banner, just give the truth, in simple plain language, and nicely ask for consent. Transparency builds trust, and trust builds long-term customer relationships.

It’s also important to offer users genuine choice—an easy way to opt out or manage preferences should be just as visible as the option to accept all cookies. 

This creates an environment where users feel in control of their data. In turn, when users believe you’re respecting their privacy, they are more likely to engage with your site and consent willingly.

The key to maximizing opt-in rates lies in a balanced, ethical approach. You can still inform users about the benefits of consenting, such as personalized experiences or improved site functionality, but avoid pressuring them. 

Make the experience intuitive, respectful, and informative. This balance will not only boost opt-in rates, but also enhance your brand’s reputation for transparency and user-centered design.

Building a site that doesn’t require a GDPR or cookie consent banner

It’s the sad state of the web that these tricks are prevalent and some of your favorite brands and websites use them to get them to give you that “Accept”.

Here at Plausible Analytics, we believe that the best way to optimize your opt-in rate is to build a website that doesn’t require an opt-in in the first place.

How do you achieve that?

• Review all the third parties you are using. Review their data policies and how they think about online privacy.
• Try to reduce this number. Use as few privacy-invasive services as possible.
• Switch to a privacy-friendly service if you require a specific service and cannot go without it. There’s a growing demand for privacy-first tools and a growing number of teams working on them so you are bound to find a friendlier alternative.
• Want Google Analytics but cannot get many of your visitors to consent to have their personal data tracked for advertising purposes using cookies and other mechanisms? Plausible Analytics is a cookie-less and privacy-first alternative that doesn’t track, collect nor store any personal data at all.