Plausible Blog
Discover the lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics, respecting user data and offering transparent insights.
TL;DR:
- Overview of useful WordPress plugins for implementing site search forms and displaying customizable search results.
- Tracking accurate, advanced site search analytics with one-click.
- Combining search analytics with purchase data, along with other metrics like pages visited and geographies, to create a comprehensive purchase journey analysis.
- GDPR-compliant, user-friendly, WordPress plugin. No consent banner required.
Having a search experience built in your WordPress website is many times a major expectation from your visitors.
This is especially true if you run an e-commerce store, a publication or a blog, a knowledge-base, an aggregator website like one for booking buses/hotels/flights, matching job profiles or dating profiles, a books/songs library, etc.
An on-site search bar is great for user-experience as it instantly matches them to what they are looking for. It is also a fantastic way of getting customer insights directly from the horse’s mouth: knowing about their demands, preferences, sales opportunities, current trends, stock-up requirements, etc.
Tracking what your customers are looking for when they land on your website can help understand if they:
- Find what they were looking for, i.e. do you even offer what they are searching for?
- Convert or not, when they found what they were searching for?
Both these answers open doors to relevant actions that will improve your business. To illustrate, assume you sell socks in an eCommerce store.
With site search terms data, you find out that visitors were searching for “red Christmas ankle socks” but it is not something you currently sell. If there are enough searches for the same, maybe you should stock these socks up.
Or maybe, you should not stock them up in case you don’t cater to seasonal searches or cannot ship to the country where these searches came from.
Alternatively, let’s say you already sell “red Christmas ankle socks” and the data tells you that your site visitors found what they were searching for but didn’t buy from your site. Then, you’ll know that something is not working right for them: your product quality, pictures, description, pricing, shipping time, reviews, etc.
Or say, you run a blog on B2B marketing. If you find out about the topics your readers typically search for, you can prioritize those articles.
In this article, we are sharing how you can implement an end-to-end search tracking –– right from getting the search functionality up in your site to mapping it to other relevant business analytics, so you can make data-informed business decisions.
- Implementing site search in WordPress
- Site search plugins lack analytics
- Plausible WordPress plugin for accurate site search and web analytics
- Getting started with the Plausible plugin
- Plausible in action
- Some more tips
Implementing site search in WordPress
The default WordPress search function is an option, but it is usually considered basic.
Here is a quick, high-level overview of some popular plugins that you can check out, followed by a deeper analysis of features.
| Plugin name | Pricing options | Rating | Active installations |
|---|---|---|---|
| SearchWP Live Ajax Search | Free; paid plans starting $99/year | 4.9 | 50,000+ |
| Ivory Search | Free; paid plans starting $19.99/year | 4.9 | 100,000+ |
| Relevanssi | Free; paid plans starting $131/year | 4.8 | 100,000+ |
| Ajax Search Lite | Free; $39 for a regular license | 4.7 | 80,000+ |
| Jetpack Search | Free; paid plans starting $70/year | 4.4 | 5,000+ |
| Better Search | Free & open source; pro license available | 4.5 | 7,000+ |
| Search & Filter | Free; paid plans starting $25/year | 4.6 | 50,000+ |
| WP Search with Algolia | Free; paid plans starting with pay-as-you-go | 4.5 | 7,000+ |
| WP Extended Search | Free & open-source | 4.9 | 20,000+ |
| FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce | Free; paid plans starting $49/year | 4.9 | 100,000+ |
Let’s explore each option in more depth.
SearchWP Live Ajax Search
SearchWP plugin provides real-time, Ajax-powered search results with indexing capabilities. One of the most popular plugins for this purpose, it constantly offers thoughtful, newer and powerful features.
Usually suitable for websites with diverse content types requiring flexible search customization.
Key features include:
- Real-time Ajax search for instant results.
- Templates to make custom, embeddable search forms.
- Indexes, extracts, searches and presents various content types like custom post types, custom fields, taxonomies, PDF/Office documents, and more.
- Search results support Boolean search and keyword stemming.
- Integrates with Multisite, WPML, eCommerce platforms, and more.
- Analytics on search queries, visitor clicks, click-through-rates.
- Customizable search result ordering for better relevance.
Things to consider:
- Might be an overkill for smaller websites that don’t need complex indexing.
- Requires some technical setup for users unfamiliar with advanced search customization.
- Paid versions can be expensive for smaller budgets.
Ivory Search
Ivory Search – WordPress Search Plugin is another preferred one. It helps you display custom search forms in various areas of your site, including the header, footer, sidebar, widget areas, navigation menu, or within posts, pages, and custom post types. You can embed these forms using shortcodes.
Key features include:
- Searches WooCommerce products, including SKU and attributes, with customizable results.
- Indexes media files (images, audio, video, PDFs) by title, caption, and description.
- Creates unlimited search forms tailored for specific content types.
- Displays search forms in headers, footers, navigation menus, or anywhere using shortcodes.
- Highlights searched terms and supports fuzzy matching and keyword stemming.
- Controls the display order of search results based on multiple criteria.
- Excludes specific content types from search results.
Things to consider:
- Can be challenging for beginners to configure the unlimited search form options without proper guidance.
- Lacks advanced search filtering options like Boolean search or keyword stemming.
Relevanssi
Relevanssi is another powerful plugin that enhances WordPress search by prioritizing relevance in search results and supporting partial word matching, fuzzy matching, and customizable excerpts.
Key features include:
- Search results sorted by relevance rather than date.
- Fuzzy Matching, i.e. supports partial word matching for flexible searches.
- Custom Excerpts, i.e. highlights search terms within results for better visibility.
- Searches comments, tags, categories, and custom fields.
- Allows for AND/OR searches and phrase searching.
- Tracks search queries, popular searches, and queries with no results.
- Compatible with WordPress multisite installations.
- Includes the ability to index custom content types and taxonomies.
Things to consider:
- Can be resource-heavy, especially on large sites with lots of content.
- Setting up custom excerpts or configuring advanced search options may require technical knowledge.
- Costlier than its alternatives.
- No real-time Ajax search, which may be a drawback for users wanting instant results. Although, Relevanssi offers that option as a separate plugin.
Ajax Search Lite
Ajax Search Lite plugin delivers real-time search results with customizable layout options and filtering by categories or tags. It integrates easily into most themes and supports image-based search results. More suitable for small to medium-sized sites.
Key features include:
- Provides real-time results as users type.
- Flexible styles and layout options to match site design.
- Filters search results by content type (posts, pages, custom types).
- Allows searching within specific categories and tags.
- Responsive design: Optimized for mobile devices.
- Keyword suggestions: Auto-suggestions for better search accuracy.
- Displays images in search results for visual engagement.
- Offers custom results layout. Modify result display (list or grid format).
- Shortcode integration: Easy to add to posts, pages, or widgets.
- Compatible with most WordPress themes without major changes.
Things to consider:
- Lacks advanced analytics or search tracking, limiting insights into user search behavior.
- More suitable for smaller or mid-sized sites; large sites may find performance limitations.
- Limited integration with eCommerce platforms, making it less ideal for product-heavy sites. Has basic support for WooCommerce.
Jetpack Search
Jetpack Search plugin offers fast, scalable, and real-time search results with advanced language support and relevance algorithms, making it a considerable choice for large, multilingual websites.
Key features include:
- Provides real-time search results without page reloads.
- Allows users to filter by categories, tags, dates, and custom taxonomies.
- Customizable design.
- Updates the search index within minutes of site changes.
- Supports eCommerce product searches.
- Handles advanced language analysis for 38 languages.
- Spelling correction: Fast and accurate correction of search queries.
- Modern ranking algorithms: Ensures highly relevant search results based on user behavior.
Things to consider:
- Jetpack’s overall plugin can be resource-intensive and may slow down smaller sites.
- Lacks analytics.
- Customization options for search display are not as advanced as some other plugins.
Better Search
Better Search – Relevant search results for WordPress plugin is simple and open-sourced.
Key features include:
- Prioritizes relevance-based search, not date-based.
- Allows template customization for tailored search result displays.
- Search heatmaps: Tracks popular search terms to understand user behavior.
- Supports custom post types, extends search capabilities beyond posts and pages.
- Works with popular caching plugins to ensure performance.
- Easy to install and configure without requiring advanced technical knowledge.
Things to consider:
- Lacks real-time search or Ajax functionality, which can feel slower.
- Customization options for the appearance of search results are limited compared to other plugins.
- Analytics and tracking features are not as detailed as some alternatives.
Search & Filter
Search & Filter plugin refines your content discovery with filtering options. Narrow down results using Categories, Tags, Custom Taxonomies, Post Types, and Publication Dates –– or combine these criteria for precision. This system can replace traditional search boxes, allowing users to filter posts and pages effortlessly.
Key features include:
- Custom search and filtering by categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and post types
- Flexible input types including dropdowns, checkboxes, and radio buttons
- Ajax functionality for results without page reloads
- Result ordering by criteria like date and title
- Drag & drop editor for easy form customization
- eCommerce compatibility
- Shortcode and widget support for placing search forms anywhere
- Multilingual support compatible with WPML
Things to consider:
- No built-in auto-suggestion features, which could limit user experience.
- Lacks analytics and search query tracking.
WP Search with Algolia
WP Search with Algolia plugin integrates Algolia’s fast and scalable infrastructure for real-time search results, considerable for large sites with high traffic and developers needing advanced customization.
Key features include:
- Integrates the search tool Algolia directly into a WordPress website, using API keys.
- Instant search results: Provides real-time results as users type.
- Autocomplete suggestions: Enhances user experience with predictive text suggestions.
- Customizable search: Allows full customization of search behavior and display.
- Supports multiple content types: Indexes posts, pages, and custom post types.
- Scalable performance: Leverages Algolia’s infrastructure for fast and efficient search, even on large sites.
- Developer-friendly: Offers hooks and filters for further customization.
Things to consider:
- Requires an Algolia account.
- Initial setup might be complex for users without technical knowledge, as it involves API key integration.
WP Extended Search
WP Extended Search plugin is free and open-source. It adds advanced search filters for post titles, content, categories, tags, and metadata. The setup is user-friendly, and the plugin is lightweight, making it suitable for most WordPress sites.
Key features include:
- Advanced search filters: Customize searches across post titles, content, excerpts, metadata, categories, and tags.
- Multiple search combinations: Allows for flexible search criteria configurations.
- Custom post type support: Enables searching across custom content types.
- Exclusion options: Exclude specific content types or posts from search results.
- Easy setup: User-friendly interface for quick configuration.
- Lightweight and fast: Minimal performance impact on site speed.
Things to consider:
- Doesn’t offer real-time or Ajax-based search, limiting responsiveness.
- Limited design customization options for search results display.
- Lacks analytics or search term tracking.
FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce
FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce plugin provides instant product search results with product previews (images, prices, and descriptions) and supports searching by SKU and product attributes.
Key features include:
- Instant product search results: Shows live search results as users type.
- Detailed product previews: Displays product images, prices, and descriptions directly in search results.
- Allows searches by SKU and other WooCommerce product attributes.
- Customizable search box and results: Offers design options to match your site’s styling.
- Filters search results by product categories.
- Mobile optimization: Ensures smooth functionality on mobile devices.
- Tracks and displays search queries data, for insights.
Things to consider:
- Its focus on WooCommerce means it is not that suitable for non-eCommerce websites.
- Analytics are basic compared to more detailed search behavior tracking offered by some of its alternatives.
Side note: These lists are purely informational, based on the available information in October 2024. We do not endorse either of the above mentioned plugins.
Site search plugins lack analytics
As illustrated above, many plugins don’t even offer basic analytic data, since their main focus is to help WordPress site owners implement the search widget and relevant results.
For eg., The JetPack Search FAQ clearly states that “The dashboard does not record the terms your readers use when using the Jetpack Search form on your site (or any other search forms on your site).”
Only a few plugins allow you to track and filter basic search statistics by time period, whether results were found, specific search strings and substrings, etc.
No plugins offer granular insights.
Site owners need supporting data along with basic site search analytics to be able to draw a complete picture of the user journey––from searching to converting––and make real business decisions.
Site search data coupled with other important data, like:
- Geographical data (where particular searches came from)
- Conversion data (whether a search resulted in a purchase/add-to-cart/wishlist or not)
- Total traffic data
- Visit duration data
- Landing pages visited data
- Entry and Exit pages data
- Devices, operating systems, browsers data
- etc.,
…is the best kind of data.
It provides you with all the necessary information –– an end-to-end view from search terms to conversions –– to make important business decisions. It’s like SEO, but internally for your site.
Therefore, you need a analytics plugin in your WordPress toolkit.
Plausible WordPress plugin for accurate site search and web analytics
Plausible Analytics is a lightweight, super-simple, web analytics plugin for WordPress. The best part is that all it takes is one click to enable site search terms tracking.
Plausible works regardless of the site search plugin or WordPress theme or custom code you use. If there’s a search happening on your site, with the help of any technology, Plausible can track and display the data for you.
Features in the Plausible WordPress plugin
- Track any and all search terms used on your site.
- See how many search results are generated for each search term your visitors use.
- Link site searches to any important business goals.
- Track data from any search plugin you use.
- Easy, single-page dashboard.
- Minimal development. Up in minutes.
- Updated regularly.
Plausible is more powerful than Google Analytics, for site search tracking and other data
Google Analytics 4 also offers site search tracking as an enhanced measurement. But Plausible is better at it for the following reasons.
Showing the number of search results generated
Plausible Analytics plugin can show you how many search results are generated for each search term your visitors use. For eg., If a visitor searches for “paid ads guide” on your top marketing articles compilation site, the plugin can tell you that the search returned 20 results.
GA4 does not have this capability.
Comparing site search data with regular traffic
In Plausible, you get a single dashboard with all your traffic data. For site search data, you simply add it as a filter in the same dashboard and see a holistic view.
In Google Analytics, if you want to compare total sessions with the ones that had searches, you need to build two different cohorts/audience segments in a complex settings panel: “Sessions with site search” and “sessions without site search”, then utilize it all as dimensions in a Free Form report to start analyzing data.
Ease of reporting
To be able to see a simple site search report, you need to first build a complex Free Form report, understanding and choosing from different dimensions and adding them correctly.
Similarly, joining site search data with other useful data like conversion data, landing pages visited data, or SEO data is more cumbersome in Google Analytics 4, requiring either creating an even more unnecessarily complex Free Form report from scratch, or switching between this Free Form report and Traffic and User Acquisition reports, hidden beneath layers of menus.
While doing that, you also need to ensure that Google Tag Manager settings are at par, with all the parameters in place with proper character limits.
In Plausible, the site search tracking setup is basically one toggle, and the analysis happens on a single-page, user-friendly report, with even more accurate insights and less cumbersome work than GA4.
Even the SEO data (directly sourced from Google Search Console), channels acquisition data (i.e., the “Traffic Acquisition” report in GA4), pages data, and all the other data is available on one single page report.
Plausible provides more accurate insights because our script doesn’t require a consent banner setup, while GA4 does and consent banner declines cause a data loss of 55%, in comparison to Plausible.
Plausible Analytics is a simpler alternative to Google Analytics 4. We:
- Are more accurate
- Are lightweight
- Block bot traffic by default
- Are less blocked by ad blockers and privacy-first browsers
- have compliances in-built, no consent banner needed
- Are open-source and privacy-first, and more accepted by aware end-users
Getting started with the Plausible plugin
Get started with Plausible Analytics by creating a free account. You can test all features with a 30-day trial, with no credit card required. Just sign up with your name and email—it’s quick and easy.
While this account can be used on any website, we recommend using our official WordPress plugin for a much easier and quicker installation. For doing so, head over to your WordPress dashboard and follow the following steps.
- Go into the “Plugins” section in the left-hand side navigation and click on “Add New.”
- In the search box, type “Plausible Analytics” and press enter.
- Click the “Install Now” button on the listing of our official “Plausible Analytics” plugin. After the installation is finished, click “Activate.”
- Next, you’ll be guided through our setup tutorial to configure the plugin and its various options.
- You’ll also find a ‘Plausible Analytics’ entry in the ‘Settings’ menu on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard. Click it to explore more features.
- In the ‘Domain Name’ field, enter the same domain from your Plausible account, but remove ‘https’ and ‘www’ (e.g., yourdomain.com).
- Back in Plausible site settings, generate a plugin token and paste it into the ‘Plugin Token’ field in the plugin settings. This lets you manage everything directly in the WordPress plugin.
We explain these steps, along with other useful settings than just site search tracking, in more detail in our official WordPress plugin guide.
This way, you will ensure that the supporting data, like conversion data, effective marketing channels, traffic, geographies, etc., start collecting. Meanwhile, turn on site search tracking.
Enable site search tracking with a switch
In the “Enhanced measurements” section of the Plausible WordPress plugin settings, enable the “Search queries” option.
That’s it. Your site search tracking is activated, with no additional action required.
Now, whenever a search takes place in your site, it will be visible in your Plausible and WordPress dashboard along with the data on what was searched, how many times out of total traffic, how many results were displayed, conversion rate, etc. Let’s explore this in more detail below.
Plausible in action
You can feel the Plausible experience by visiting our live demo link, where our website’s statistics are completely, publicly available.
Next, let’s understand how to use your Plausible dashboard for understanding the site search data. You can also have a look at our list of best practices to ensure a fully functioning Plausible dashboard.
Filter Plausible dashboard by “Goal is WP Search Queries”
When you turn on the “Search Queries” setting in your WordPress plugin settings as explained above, search term tracking is auto-implemented as a goal in Plausible by the name of “WP Search Queries.” You can edit this display name though.
You can click on this entry from the “Goals” section of the dashboard or use the Filter option to segment your dashboard by this goal only. Once done, you will be able to view:
- Unique visitors vs unique & total conversions, with conversion rate. Since “WP Seach Queries” is implemented as a goal, the conversion in this context means that successful searches were conducted.
- Other data related to the activity that took place during the sessions in which searches were done.
- The exact search queries (case-sensitive) that took place. These queries are auto-implemented in the form of custom properties, so no additional setup is needed on your end.
How to read this report?
In the year so far, we had 32 unique visitors, out of which 3 visitors searched for something on the site 8 times. They all came from Direct sources. They exited the website from different pages (details mentioned). They came from the mentioned cities and used the mentioned browsers. They searched for “tshirt”, “Hoodie” and “hoodie.”
That’s the insight you get in an instant. Furthermore, you can go as deep as needed by clicking on any entry in this report. Let’s say you want to see the specific data for the search term: “tshirt.”
See related analytics for a particular search term
Now you can simply click on the entry “tshirt”, or use the Filter feature. This way, all the data in the report will be related to “tshirts” searches only: the marketing acquisition channels, the geographical data, the top/entry/exit pages, and everything else.
If you want to see if tshirts lead to an actual purchase on the site, you can visualize that with the help of funnels.
P.S. The funnel in this example has been setup for a demo WooCommerce store. If you actually use WooCommerce, check out here how to enable your store’s tracking in a single click, with our WordPress plugin.
Apart from completing purchases, you can track any goal related to the search term. A goal can be anything for your website: a successful purchase, a newsletter subscription, a product sign-up, event sign-up, wishlisting of items, etc. And any of that can be tracked from successful site searches to meeting that goal!
Some more tips
- Create audience segments with the help of filtering options, to save answers to particular business questions.
- Export the search statistics as a CSV file.
- Link Google Search Console with Plausible to understand search data from Google, in addition to on-site search as well.
Get started and install the plugin for free now We are waiting to see what you do with it!
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.
- How does Plausible Analytics compare to Google Analytics for WooCommerce tracking?
- In-built WooCommerce Analytics
- How to install the Plausible Analytics plugin for WooCommerce?
- One-click setup of ecommerce goals, properties, and purchase funnel
- Additional ecommerce site tracking with Plausible
- Answering key ecommerce questions with Plausible Analytics
- 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 at least 75 times bigger 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 less than 1 KB: 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] (https://plausible.io/blog/wordpress-search-tracking), 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.
As a business with an online presence, you’ll almost definitely have, at least one of, a SaaS application, a blog, an online store, product documentation, or anything table stakes such as these.
And, you’ll have some important business/marketing goals like a product signup, upgrade to subscription, newsletter signup, etc. which won’t always happen on the main domain, but rather on a subdomain.
Usually, development teams create subdomains for easily organizing and managing these pages/apps/store. This raises the question: How to track pageviews, events, and conversions across your main domain and subdomains?
- What even is a subdomain?
- [Anatomy] How a user travels from a place on the internet to converting on your site
- Zooming out
- Example: Tracking signups to your SaaS app across domain and subdomains
- Other things to note
- Winding up
What even is a subdomain?
This is an important question because subdomain tracking is generally confused with cross-domain tracking. Let’s learn the differences quickly:
Domain
A domain is like the identity of a URL. For eg. in [www.plausible.io](http://www.plausible.io)\, `plausible.io` is the domain.
Subdomain
A subdomain is used to organize and separate different sections or functions of a website. For example, “app.plausible.io” or “blog.plausible.io” could be subdomains of the main domain “plausible.io”.
Hostname
Hostname is that part of the URL that comes after the protocol (https://) and before the path (e.g., /about-us). So it could be either a domain or a subdomain.
[Anatomy] How a user travels from a place on the internet to converting on your site
Think of it from the perspective of the tracking JavaScript snippet provided by your web analytics tool. Take a moment to look at the following representation of the user journey:
So from the perspective of the JavaScript (JS) snippet, when a visitor comes to your site through a referral link, the JavaScript (JS) code checks for any referral or UTM values.
So, it is able to record where the session came from. This, by the way, is how our Top Sources report is made. For example, if someone clicks on a link from a social media post with utm_source=facebook, the JS code will note ‘facebook’ as the source of that visit.
Then as the user interacts with your site, the JS snippet keeps recording such interactions in the form of pageviews, button clicks, or any custom events for that matter.
Let’s say, the user now goes to `app.subdomain.com`, where you have a sign-up button tied to a key business or marketing goal. The JS snippet continues to monitor their actions.
This approach ensures that the visitor’s session remains active across your main site and its subdomains. You can set up custom events or pageview goals in Plausible to track specific actions and even create a funnel to follow the user’s journey across a domain and its subdomains.
Importantly, any conversions on subdomains, such as signing up, will be attributed back to the original referral source from the main domain.
Zooming out
Now that we understand what everything means and how everything works, let’s focus on how to set everything up.
Set up your subdomain tracking
Plausible, and most web analytic tools, recognize this requirement and automatically handle subdomain tracking when you simply register with a main domain only.
Just ensure that your same tracking script is included in the header of the source code of such subdomains as well and your job will be done. In-depth instructions are here.
Set up some goals
Do you want to map your user journeys against some business/marketing goals? Decide what you want to track as a goal. Revenue attributed goals are also possible to create with Plausible, and other web analytic tools.
In Plausible, this is easily doable with either pageview goals or custom event goals, which can even be visualized well in funnels to follow the user journey across domains/subdomains.
Utilize the dashboard appropriately
To actually “attribute” the conversions, you would need to filter your dashboard by this conversion (goal) itself and maybe, by the referrer source for a more in-depth analysis. For example, doing this for our own live dashboard produces the following result:
This way, you will only see the segment of the traffic from a particular source that converted, along with the conversion rate.
This data is regardless of the hostname. That is, the data is a holistic representation of the user journey that has already taken into account any subdomain tracking required in the backend.
However, you can also refine your analysis by filtering your dashboard by hostname. By default, the Plausible dashboard displays all traffic across all your domains (basically wherever the same JS tracking script is added to).
But filtering by a specific subdomain helps you segment your traffic and focus on data from a particular subdomain.
P.S. Filtering by hostname is also beneficial when you have pages with identical paths on different sites. For example, if you have a page path like /best-page/ on both yourdomain.com and docs.yourdomain.com, these identical paths will be consolidated into a single entry in the “Top Pages” report on your global dashboard, with combined statistics.
By applying a hostname filter, you can differentiate between the performance of yourdomain.com/best-page/ and docs.yourdomain.com/best-page/, allowing you to see the number of visitors and pageviews for each separately.
Example: Tracking signups to your SaaS app across domain and subdomains
Let’s say you’re running a SaaS business with the following setup:
Main website: www.yoursaas.com
App subdomain: app.yoursaas.com
Blog subdomain: blog.yoursaas.com
Your primary goal is to track how users move from your main website (www.yoursaas.com) or blog (blog.yoursaas.com) to the app (app.yoursaas.com) and complete a signup.
Steps to track signups across domain/subdomains
1. Add the Tracking Script. Ensure the same JavaScript tracking snippet provided by your web analytics tool (like Plausible, Google Analytics, Matomo) is added to the header of every page across all domains and subdomains: `www.yoursaas.com`, `blog.yoursaas.com`, and `app.yoursaas.com`.
2. Set up a goal for signups. In your web analytics tool, define a custom event or pageview goal for the signup completion.
For example, if your signup form redirects users to `app.yoursaas.com/thank-you`, you can set a pageview goal for that specific URL path.
3. Monitor the user journey. The tracking script will monitor the user’s journey from the main domain or blog to the app. If a user lands on `www.yoursaas.com`, reads a blog post on `blog.yoursaas.com`, and then clicks a “Sign Up” button that redirects them to `app.yoursaas.com/signup`, their journey will be recorded as a single session.
If the user signs up successfully, the conversion will be attributed to the original referral source, whether it’s organic search, social media, or another channel.
4. Utilize the dashboard. Go to your analytics dashboard and filter by the signup goal to see how many users completed the signup process. This will show you the overall conversion rate, regardless of whether the signup happened on the main domain or a subdomain.
In Plausible, you can further filter by hostnames as well.
5. Analyze the data. Look at the Top Sources report (which are basically channel-acquisition reports) to understand where your converting users are coming from.
Use the funnel visualization (if available in your analytics tool) to track the step-by-step process users take from their initial visit to signup, across different domains and subdomains.
Congrats! You’re effectively tracking and attributing signups across different domains and subdomains, giving you a clear picture of your user journey and conversion sources.
Other things to note
About cross-domain tracking
If you include your tracking script on a different domain, this’d help the web analytic tool know that a click to that other domain isn’t supposed to be counted as an exit and is a part of the user journey.
You may need this in cases where say a customer browses your website, and clicks a link to your billing page which is hosted on a different domain altogether.
Tools like Google Analytics 4 require some additional setup for tracking users beyond your own domains but can help you profile users and map their full journeys even beyond your domain.
In the case of Plausible, you can simply include your tracking script on a completely different domain (not subdomain), with no additional setup.
However, with Plausible, the same user session will not continue between these different domains, to prevent user profiling and be GDPR compliant by design, and it is better to track domain-exits as outbound link clicks.
Common mistakes to avoid
- You don’t need to add a new site or account on Plausible for tracking different hostnames/subdomains. Same is true for the properties in GA4. But you can do so if you prefer.
- Sometimes, unexpected hostnames appear that can pollute your data. You can easily allow only specific hostnames from your Plausible settings.
- In case you have multiple dashboards for different subdomains/domains, you don’t need to switch dashboards every now and then. Just use one combined dashboard. However, keep in mind that this doesn’t represent a single, continuous user journey. Since a unique user session is only tracked across subdomains using the same script, including multiple different domains in one dashboard could lead to confusion.
Winding up
Do you use cross-hostname tracking for specific use cases? We want to know! Write in at [email protected]. Ciao!
Whether you’ve recently added a new tracking snippet to your site or have reasons to believe that your web analytics might not be functioning properly, it’s a good idea to verify if your analytics setup is correctly installed.
Doing this can help eliminate ambiguity and ensure a strong base for analyzing site traffic, understanding user behaviors, and drawing meaningful conclusions.
In this post, we discuss everything that you can possibly do to ensure that your web analytics setup is working just fine! If you’re using Plausible, jump to the section about troubleshooting a Plausible script.
- A comprehensive framework to troubleshoot any web analytic script’s installation issues
- Ensuring Plausible Analytics is installed correctly
- Ensuring Google Analytics 4 is installed correctly
- A tip to ensure a good analytics setup
A comprehensive framework to troubleshoot any web analytic script’s installation issues
Web analytic tracking codes are typically JavaScript snippets. When installed on web pages, they serve as the medium for collecting data from visitor interactions on one hand and reporting them to the UI on the other.
This is a general guide for checking for possible analytics installation issues that can be applied to most web analytic tracking tools.
Start by checking your Real Time and/or Landing Pages data
The best way to quickly verify that your analytics script is working is to check the real-time data. If the data is showing up correctly, it means your script is functioning properly. If your analytic tool does not have Real Time reports, wait for a few minutes to see if data shows up in standard reports.
Alternatively, see if you can spot some landing pages getting no or unusually little traffic. One possible cause of this could be that your website developer missed adding the tracking script to a few web pages, or you’re running analytics for a Single Page Application (SPA) with a broken installation.
To prevent this, make sure the script is added to the source code of every page on your site. If you’re using an official plugin, like Plausible for WordPress, it can help ensure the script is properly included everywhere by default.
If this is not it, move over to the Browser Console as explained below.
Check the Network tab of your Browser Console
This is where you can get the full picture of whether your tracking code is working properly or not. Start by opening a web page, right-click anywhere, and go to “Inspect” -> “Network” tab. Use the search bar to search for your script’s file by trying keywords like “script”, “plausible”, “analytics”, or similar.
Locate the file and check if it is loading. For example, If I do this activity for Plausible’s blog page, then this is what I should see:
The green dot with “200 OK” here indicates that the tracking script is loading fine on this webpage. For some scripts, this number might not always be 200. As long as it’s in the 200-299 range, the loading is successful.
Tip: If you are doing this activity for checking the collection of specific events, or want to access every script loaded by Plausible, then try searching for “url:plausible.io”.
Note: In case your website admin has added the analytics script via an NPM package directly in the source code, the network tab may not show the script being downloaded, however the tracking events will still show up as you interact with the website.
If the script is not loading…
If you found out that the script is not loading, then check these things:
- Check if you have an ad blocker installed. Disable the ad blocker for this web page, and reload it to check if the script starts loading. Alternatively, you can allow your analytics domain within your ad blocker’s settings. Some analytics tools allow you to serve the script from your own domain. Here’s how you can do it for Plausible.
- Check with a different browser. Some browsers like Safari are stricter with privacy, and may be blocking your tracker by default. Try troubleshooting on a different browser.
- Check your internet. If you are on a company network while testing, that may be blocking the script from loading. Or your Internet Service Provider could be blocking it, in which case try switching to a different network or to your mobile hotspot.
If the script is loading, but you still don’t see data…
If this is the case, then check for these things:
- Check if the script URL is correct. A script URL is the address of a JavaScript file included on a webpage. For eg. Plausible’s default script mentions the script URL as “src=…” Like this:
<script defer data-domain="yourdomain.com" src="https://plausible.io/js/script.js"></script> - Check if the identifiers are correctly added. Analytic tools assign unique tracking IDs to each website. For eg. In Plausible, we use your domain name as the unique tracking ID. See the “data-domain” mentioned in the example-script above. Similarly, Google Analytics’ identifiers take the structure of “G-XXXXXXX.”
- Check for cross-domain or subdomain tracking. Multiple tools like Plausible allow for both cross-domain and subdomain tracking. For example, you can have your website on acme.com and a learning site at learn.com (a different domain) or learn.acme.com (a subdomain). Generally, subdomains are included by default. You can check your analytics app settings to ensure that traffic from all valid hostnames are allowed.
- Check if tracking is disabled for you. Some analytic tools allow ignoring internal traffic by either setting cookies on your browser or blocking IP addresses. Run your tests in the Incognito tab or simply check your analytic tool’s settings to confirm if this is the reason your own visits are not counted.
- Check if the script needs to be manually initialized after loading. Some tracking codes (although not common with web analytic tracking tools) need to be manually initialized after loading to start collecting visitor data and sending it to analytic tool’s servers. Check your tool’s documentation to see if the script needs to be manually initialized and follow the necessary steps.
- Check for errors in the JS console. If you see an error in your JS console, then you need to contact either your dev team or your web analytic tool’s support team. A JS Console error looks similar to the following screenshot, although not exact.
Contact the Support team
If you haven’t found a solution, do contact the respective support team. :)
Ensuring Plausible Analytics is installed correctly
Once you have added the Plausible tracking snippet to your site and have had some traffic, you should ideally start seeing some numbers on a normally functioning dashboard such as ours.
If your site hasn’t had traffic yet, you may see a blinking green dot indicating that the Plausible tracking code is listening for any incoming traffic.
Plausible’s automatic script-testing tool
While Plausible listens for incoming traffic, it automatically launches a testing tool to verify if the script is able to correctly track traffic and record it in the dashboard. This works by sending some test traffic to your site.
Don’t worry, such test traffic won’t be falsely displayed as your actual traffic to the site. Instead, you will only see a success message indicating that everything is working fine. If you see this message, you can relax.
Your visits are still not recorded…
If you are confused as to why your own visits are still not getting counted by our script, do try the solutions explained in the section above. In addition to them, you can note the following:
- If you use browser extensions such as ad blockers, it can sometimes stop our script from loading. We are typically not blocked by a majority of ad blockers since we are a privacy-friendly analytics tool. But if you think this is happening anyway, then add our script to the allow-list.
- If you installed Plausible through our WordPress plugin, then all logged-in admin visits will be blocked by default.
Other issues
If you still don’t have a normally functioning dashboard, there can be many other reasons that can be easily resolved. We have put together a comprehensive troubleshooting guide to help with the same. Do contact our support team if this doesn’t resolve your issues.
Ensuring Google Analytics 4 is installed correctly
To ensure Google Analytics is installed correctly, you can check your Real Time reports. If you are instead confused about data discrepancies in your standard reports, it could be happening due to the 24-48 hours waiting period.
If you installed Google Analytics 4 using Google Tag Manager, use the “Preview” option in Google Tag Manager to understand which all pages or events your tag is firing.
You can also install the “Tag Assistant” Chrome extension to do the same process. Plus: to ensure that the data is also flowing correctly to GA4, use the DebugView.
If you installed Google Analytics 4 using gtag.js, you can install the “GA debugger” Chrome extension and use it to test the website where gtag is installed. Again, you’ll need to check GA4’s DebugView in addition to this as well.
If these processes don’t help, then check your site’s Network tab and follow the process outlined in the sections above.
A tip to ensure a good analytics setup
Implement your tracking setup in batches. If you have a robust measurement plan with a lot of events to track and are just starting to set up a new analytics account, then do not install everything in one go.
Start by implementing the foundational events, this will reduce the amount of noise in the data, and will help you ensure that the tracking is working as expected. You can then test them for a couple of days, and continue the exercise with other events as well.
An e-commerce website has various ways of earning sales. Customers can find you through your ads, email campaigns, social campaigns, SEO, directly visiting your website and more. The process of understanding which channels are the most effective for your e-commerce store to generate sales is known as ecommerce revenue attribution.
- What is ecommerce revenue attribution in website analytics?
- How to track revenue attributions in web analytics?
- How to boost ecommerce sales using revenue attribution data?
- Concluding
What is ecommerce revenue attribution in website analytics?
Website analytics help get a birds eye view of the marketing channels, marketing campaigns, website assets, and/or any touchpoints in the buyer’s journey that contribute to a sale on your online store.
And you can learn a few things about your users too. For eg. which locations or types of devices, OS, and browsers see more sales.
Overall, you can answer some main questions like which of, and how, your products get sold the most or the least. And some other pressing questions like what is in wishlists but not getting sold, what is being searched for, which products are being viewed, how many people are abandoning carts, and so on.
Based on such data, you can optimize your budgets, copy, website and marketing campaigns for improving sales.
Revenue Attribution models
Since a customer’s journey leading up to a purchase can be lengthy and random, spanning across different touchpoints and days, it can be tricky to credit only one touchpoint for the eventual sale.
Hence, there are various types of revenue attribution models used by different web analytic tools:
Single-touch attribution models
Last-touch attribution: Fully credits the last touchpoint in a buyer’s journey. For eg. Directly visiting the product page to purchase it.
First-touch attribution: Fully credits the first marketing touchpoint in a buyer’s journey. For eg. Seeing your ad on Instagram.
Multi-touch attribution models
Time-decay attribution: Gives more credit to touchpoints closer to the time of purchase.
Linear attribution: Distributes credit evenly across all touchpoints.
U-shaped / Position-based attribution: Usually assigns 40% credit each to the first and last touchpoint, and assigns the remaining 20% evenly across the touchpoints appearing in the middle of the journey.
Data-driven attribution: Is the most flexible one that takes more factors into account, and uses algorithms to determine how to credit different customer touchpoints.
Google Analytics 4 has deprecated most of these models and currently (as of mid-2024) has two active models: the last-touch and data-driven attribution models. Plausible, being a privacy-first tool, has only a last-touch attribution model. Different web analytic tools may use a combination of different models.
Let’s get into it. ⬇️
How to track revenue attributions in web analytics?
Everything in web analytics revolves around events. Any insight you want to learn about your ecommerce site, like which product is getting sold, what is in wishlists, what is in carts, what is being searched for, how many refund requests you get, which promo codes are applied the most, etc, can be converted into an event, and related custom dimensions.
And any event that brings in revenue to you –– which mostly happens to be the sale of a product –– can be assigned a dynamic monetary value in any currency. This can be done in pretty much any web analytics tool.
This, when mapped against other data from your reports –– like associated traffic sources, top performing pages, engaging elements of the website, types of devices used, etc. –– helps you understand the correlations between these marketing activities and sales. The ideal goal is to recognize which factors significantly affect the sales.
For eg. If you sell hoodies on your ecommerce store, you could set “purchase_hoodie” as an event and enable revenue tracking for it. So whenever a customer buys this hoodie, your web analytic tool will record it as an event and assign it its revenue-value.
To visualize such conversion reports, there are various methods.
Tracking revenue-synced conversions in Google Analytics 4
Depending on the attribution model and types of reports in GA4, you can learn different types of things about different types of methods of revenue acquisitions. Here’s a simplified overview of the same:
Through Traffic Acquisition reports
The Traffic Acquisition reports in Google Analytics are session-based. They tell which channels (direct, organic search, email, social, organic shopping, etc.) you acquire new sessions from, regardless of whether the user is new or returning.
Therefore, this report uses a non-direct last-touch attribution model, i.e. it answers the question that where was such a session acquired from, wherein a conversion happened?
P.S. “Non-direct” here means that direct sources of traffic are never considered for attributing a traffic acquisition source.
Through User Acquisition reports
The User Acquisition reports in Google Analytics have user-scoped custom dimensions. This means that once GA’s tracking code identifies a user through one of these methods, it remembers them for some days, and tracks how that user is interacting with the website every time they visit.
This helps you draw a full picture of user journeys, from the point of acquisition to the point of conversion. This is why this report inherently uses a first-touch attribution model.
Through Advertising reports
If you run ad campaigns, then Advertising reports will be useful to understand buyer acquisitions too. They use both data-driven and last-touch attribution models.
Through other reports
Other than the situations mentioned above, there are two more flexible ways of reporting in Google Analytics that will help you see different channels of buyer acquisition:
- If you filter any report by dimensions like UTM source, medium, campaign, etc. and not by “session…” or “first user…” types of dimensions.
- If you make Exploration reports.
To determine which of the two available attribution models in GA4 you’d want these types of reports to use –– data-driven or last-touch –– you’ll need to configure your Attribution settings from the Admin panel. These settings would not affect the three standard types of reporting described above.
Downsides of using the data-driven attribution model
It is extremely important to acknowledge that the data-driven attribution model has some major downsides. It seems lucrative at first, because it takes away the pain of determining the best attribution models to use for your use case and leaves this job with machine learning.
Google Analytics’ AI and ML proactively study all the customer journey paths and different user actions in the background. They notice patterns and calculate conversion probabilities for different user paths. Based on this, it assigns different weightages to various marketing touchpoints leading up to a purchase.
However, you are almost always guaranteed to get half-baked and inaccurate data due to the following reasons:
- Various privacy regulations, especially from the European Union and the USA, require GA users to ask for website visitors’ consent before collecting and processing their data. Naturally, many visitors decline such requests, while your website experience gets downgraded for everyone.
- Many privacy-first systems like Apple prevent user tracking by default. This means a huge loss of data.
- A wide variety of users use Ad blockers these days, which prevents a Google Analytics script from loading at all.
- These attribution models depend on first-party cookies that expire, or can easily be deleted by a user. And any model remotely depending on third-party cookies is bound to die within this year.
- The sheer randomness of user behaviors makes it just not possible to track every single touchpoint. For eg. You cannot really ever know if a buyer came to you because of seeing a billboard, from word-of-mouth, or if they switched browsers and devices while interacting with your site a dozen times. So even meticulously built reports can mislead you, rendering the whole process worthless.
- This model keeps you in the dark because you have no idea what exactly is happening in the background, and have no control over it.
That leaves a single logical choice for tracking accurate revenue attributions: the last-touch model; with a tool that is privacy-compliant and doesn’t use cookies either. Here’s how we do it with Plausible. ⬇️
Tracking revenue-synced conversions in Plausible
In Plausible, website traffic is tracked based on sessions, and we don’t remember a user beyond one day. You get a simple dashboard, without hidden layers of menus and without having to figure out different attribution models.
Plus:
- You can get simple and quick answers at a glance.
- You don’t need to employ any consent banners on your website. This is because we are built in the EU, and are privacy-first and open-source by principle.
- You don’t have to worry about cookies-related issues because we use a cookie-less mechanism to track website data.
- You can also count data from the users who use ad blockers, by using a proxy.
You can simply filter your traffic by a revenue-marked goal, and see an overview of the sources (channels + campaigns) that brought in those sessions, the pages that received those sessions, and the devices, browsers, operating systems on which the sessions were conducted.
P.S. If you have an e-commerce store powered by WooCommerce, you should check out our plugin for implementing a full e-commerce tracking setup in literally one-click.
Assume a situation where you have an ecommerce store on Shopify that sells hoodies and beanies. For marketing, you run Google ads, post daily on Instagram, and have some referral links from other domains. This is how you can understand which channels, campaigns, and other factors work best for your sales:
Start by setting up some event-goals, including revenue-marked purchase goals. In this case, your event-goals can be “complete purchase” (a revenue-marked goal), “start checkout”, “remove from cart”, “add to cart”, “add to wishlist”, etc. Along with such events, you can send some custom properties like product category, product name, product color, product size, etc.
Once everything is set up and you have started receiving data, use your dashboard to simply filter your traffic by such goals and/or properties in the dashboard. Here is an example:
In this example, the user has their dashboard filtered by “All time” data, the goal of “complete purchase” and the property of “product category is hoodies”. So every metric they see on this single-page report is directly related to the session in which the conversions (hoodie sales) occurred.
They can see the revenue earned, the campaigns that contributed to the sale (possible due to UTM tracking), the all-time top pages that received the most traffic in the sessions receiving conversions, and some other data like locations and devices.
By toggling amongst UTM sources, mediums, campaigns, content, and terms, the user can understand the effectiveness of such traffic sources too. Similarly, they can toggle between top, entry and exit pages to understand their best performing webpages.
You can also do a ton of other stuff to understand your revenue attributions:
Making the most of Plausible
Tag your URLs with referral sources or UTM tagging, whenever using them in your ads, socials, emails, or anywhere else. This will keep your traffic from getting shown in the Direct/Unknown category, and give you a better view of the 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 sales.
Create funnels to understand the customer journey from landing on your site to making a purchase (during a session). The most common type of sales funnel used by e-commerce brands is “visits /product -> adds to cart -> starts checkout -> completes checkout”.
How to boost ecommerce sales using revenue attribution data?
Using web analytics to understand your shoppers’ behavior, your most popular products, effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns, areas of concern, etc. is very helpful, but even more effective if you use these insights in certain ways.
Maximize average order value
To do this, track the effectiveness of your CTAs, upsells, cross-sells, product pages, and checkout screens using the methods described above. And make adjustments as you see fit.
Moreover, you can learn which of your products are frequently bought together and create valuable assortments or experiment with discounts to encourage bigger purchases.
Or, you can identify the most effective incentives and reward structures to create relevant loyalty programs.
Identify/Confirm product market fit
Newer direct-to-consumer brands should use insights from revenue attribution tracking to quickly recognize what’s working and what isn’t for them. This helps with building agility in terms of experimenting with different product lines or types, messaging, marketing strategies, and audiences.
Optimize marketing ROI
When you have enough data about your marketing campaigns, you can double down on the top-performing sources and trim down the underperforming ones.
Similarly, you can maximize time on site by analyzing which website elements get the most engagement. For eg. If you learn that your customers always read technical specifications about a product, you can improve its quality by investing in product videos, or answering FAQs.
Or if you learn that a blog post about the cutting-edge uses of your new product line is very popular, then you can create similar content around the subject.
Reduce cart abandonment issues
You can use funnels to understand at which point in the shopper’s journey they mostly abandon the cart. For instance, if you find out that the drop-offs have been the highest for the past 30 days after the checkout process starts, then there may be some issue with the billing page or with the shipping fees.
And if you find out that the drop-offs happen the most before the checkout process starts, then you may want to offer additional promo codes to encourage the sale completion.
The possibilities would be endless with such insights!
Concluding
Tracking your ecommerce site is like getting intel straight from your products, search bar, wish lists, shopping carts, and whatnot, about how well shoppers are interacting with them. All that, without having to disrespect your customers’ privacy.
If there’s a certain way you use your Plausible dashboard to understand e-commerce insights, we are curious. Let us know at [email protected]. ✌️
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Plausible provide basic information, but they can’t automatically track everything you need. Custom dimensions allow you to capture specific data that goes beyond standard metrics.
Marketers usually spend a lot of time with website performance reports, which help you see how well your marketing, communications, and other business activities are working.
Ensuring that your analytics setup is spot on and aligns with business growth and goals becomes increasingly important over time. Custom dimensions (which are nothing but custom entries in your reports) help with this by letting you track additional details relevant to you.
In a nutshell, custom dimensions bridge the gap between the data that a standard website performance report offers and what you would like to specifically know about your website.
The more robust you want your website performance report to be, the more customized it usually needs to be. Let’s see.
What are custom dimensions?
Custom dimensions is a term coined by Google Analytics. We call it “custom properties” in Plausible. As the term suggests, custom dimensions are different sorts of features/facts/attributes, i.e. additional context, about the data you collect about the events happening on your website.
Some attributes are standard and are automatically collected by the web analytics tool you use. Such examples are page URL, page referrer, link text, engagement time, etc.
While other attributes are not automatically tracked, and need to be configured by you and are hence “custom” to your use case. To understand this well, let’s understand a few related terms first:
Events
Everything in web analytics revolves around “events.” Think of an event like any sort of activity done by a visitor on your website.
Did a visitor just load a page or start a session? Did they click a link, engage with your blog post, or download a file? Or maybe they signed up, or made a purchase. Anything that can happen on your website can also have its own “event” to be tracked in a web analytics tool.
Metrics
If dimensions –– whether standard or custom –– are descriptive facts about events, then metrics are the quantitative measurements of the performance of such dimensions.
Some examples are event-count, conversions, engagement rate, open rate, revenue per customer, conversion rate, time on page, etc.
The relationship between events, dimensions, and metrics
A dimension is an attribute about something tracked on your website. In Google Analytics 4, custom dimensions are categorized as three types:
- Event-scoped: Attributes about events happening on your site.
- Item-scoped: Attributes about products (like product ID, color, name, quantity, price, etc.), useful if you are running an e-commerce store.
- User-scoped: Tracking attributes about your visitors or users. Plausible doesn’t do user-scoped tracking because we are privacy-friendly.
We will keep the scope of this article mostly to event-scoped dimensions.
Let’s say a website event you track is “file downloads”, the following can be dimensions/attributes you might want to track about this event:
- File extension (like PDF, docx, pptx, etc.)
- File name
- Link classes
- Link ID
- Link text
- Link URL
And metrics? When you eventually see reports in your web analytics dashboard, you can see such attributes as particulars/values of those attributes and judge their performance with the help of associated metrics data available.
Here is an example from our live dashboard, where we track our visitors’ browser language:
A stupidly simple analogy
My personal favorite way to never forget something technical is to visualize in it a regular life setting. In this case, the analogy would be this: Imagine your life was analogous to your website and it had a tracking device.
You could define certain general events to be tracked. Like “waking up”. Then, the descriptive data to be collected about the “waking up” event could be “time-of-sleep”, “quality-of-sleep”, “length-of-sleep”, etc.
And when you view a report about your waking up patterns in the past 3 months, these facts would be presented as custom dimensions and the metrics would be sleep frequency, average length of sleep, sleep rate, etc.
How to use custom dimensions/properties?
Reiterating to prevent any confusion: the feature is called “Custom dimensions” in GA4 and “Custom properties” in Plausible Analytics. Understanding how to effectively use custom dimensions has two parts to it: planning your analytics, and setting them up in GA4 or Plausible.
Plan your analytics
The general purpose of analytic reporting is to recognize patterns and understand one’s strong and weak areas for improvement. However, the exercise is more fruitful if you have goals and objectives to map your metrics against.
To avoid tracking random events and dimensions, map your custom dimensions to your website’s objectives. This will also keep your reports cleaner and useful.
Website objectives vary based on the nature of the business. For instance, a SaaS tool’s website might aim to generate free trials, a news or media website’s focus could be increasing content engagement, while an e-commerce site may prioritize getting orders.
If you’re unsure about your website’s objectives, start by asking core business questions about your long-term and short-term goals. This will help derive clear website objectives.
If you’re in the early stages and still figuring out your business or marketing objectives, the goal for setting custom dimensions would in fact be to experiment and find what works best for you. In that case, be sure to update your analytics setup as you gain more clarity over time.
Based on your website’s objectives, you can enlist the relevant actions you want your users to take to help the objectives. For eg., if your goal is to increase content engagement, key actions can be visiting the blog page, or signing up for a newsletter. These can become custom events to be tracked.
Next, determine what additional context (custom dimensions) you’d like to track about these events. For eg. For the event capturing visits to the blog page, you can track attributes like author, content format, content group, topic, time on page, word-count of articles, etc.
Later, when you see your reports, you can learn stuff like which author or content topic drives the most number of clicks (a metric), or if word-count is a deciding factor in the articles that receive most clicks.
Other tips:
- You will most likely have more than one objective. And different teams have different KPIs. It is alright to track these together from a single dashboard, as long as different teams have clarity on what is their core metric to be looked at.
- For a complete visualization of how visitors interact with your website, try incorporating your events and goals into funnels.
- Regularly review and adjust your events and custom dimensions as and when you notice any changes in your goals or user behavior. This could happen monthly, half-yearly, or yearly, depending on the stage of the volatility of growth.
Setting up custom dimensions
The other important part is understanding your options and how to set up custom dimensions in different tools available. We will discuss Plausible and Google Analytics 4.
Setting up custom properties in Plausible
We, at Plausible, take special care in keeping your analytics setup and your dashboard confusion-free. To set up custom properties (same thing as custom dimensions in GA4) in your Plausible account, all you need to do is two things:
- Set some custom events/goals. There are two ways to track any event in Plausible: track pageviews (doesn’t require code editing), or track custom events (requires code editing). Secondly, add these custom events as goals to your Plausible dashboard easily. So there’s no distinction/confusion between custom events and custom goals.
- Mark which properties you want tracked. Once you know which custom event-goals you are tracking, simply edit the JS snippet to let it know which properties to track as well.
Then, you will be able to add all the properties that your JS snippet is sending to your dashboard in one click.
Once this is set up, you will be able to filter and segment your traffic based on properties on your dashboard, among other things.
Setting up custom dimensions in Google Analytics 4
Setting up custom dimensions in GA4 requires a more complex setup. Here’s a gist:
- Setting events Firstly, you need to determine with the help of GA’s documentation which events are not being tracked automatically or with the help of GA’s Enhanced Conversions set of events. If the event you want to track is not a part of either of those categories, then see if it’s a “Recommended event.” If yes, then many cases require you to follow Google’s naming convention to set these events for yourself. And if it is not a “Recommended event”, then create a custom event. Later, you can mark some events as “Key events” within your GA4 dashboard. Key events is GA4’s new name for what was earlier called “conversions”, and what we call “goals”.
- Parameters Parameters are like a precursor to custom dimensions. They tell the script what additional context to gather about an event. You need to set up textual parameters (so they can be converted to custom dimensions) and numerical parameters (so they can be converted to custom metrics). So they are pretty much like custom dimensions and custom metrics, but not quite. They only gather additional data about events in the backend, but can’t be directly used in reports. Plus: You need to make sure that you don’t create custom dimensions before seeing if there is already a predefined dimension or metric. And do check the limits on creating the number of custom dimensions and metrics of each type. P.S. In all cases of creating custom events or parameters, you would require some additional Google Tag Manager and DebugView skills as well.
- Custom dimensions and metrics Once your backend setup is complete, open your GA4 dashboard, ensure if data is being collected correctly using the DebugView. Then proceed to add custom dimensions and metrics to be displayed on your reports. For this, you can name the custom dimension or metrics something different from the parameters collecting the respective data, while adding additional information like unit of measurement, scope, and description.
- Reports While creating your free form or funnel exploration reports, remember to ensure configuring relevant dimensions and metrics therein.
Our two cents on which tool to use
Google Analytics 4 requires a learning curve, complex setup, and access to engineering know-how. You also need to do additional work in setting up some basic features for yourself. But the level of customization and robustness you get for yourself would be useful if you are a big agency or an enterprise.
On the other hand, Plausible takes responsibility for creating features that are user-friendly and we don’t put the ball in your court to figure out a bit too much about your web analytic reports.
All in all, Google Analytics 4 might be an overkill for you if you are a startup. But Plausible might be an underkill for you if you are a huge agency or an enterprise.
Parting tips
- Next time you open your reports, decide on a specific purpose (no matter how small) to see them beforehand. This will reduce randomness from your analytic-viewing time and give you an anchor to make better decisions.
- Even if you have less data, or missing data points, it is alright. Try looking for patterns instead.
- If something can be achieved without customization in the tool of your choice, choose the former approach. It’ll keep your setup much more clean and manageable in the long run.
P.S. We’re creating a series on Web Analytics features, like this one, to help you learn and apply web analytics with ease. If you have specific topics you’d like us to cover, let us know at [email protected]. We’re listening!