Help Center
New to analytics? No worries. Here's every term you'll see on your dashboard, explained like you're new to this — because everyone is at some point.
If something's still confusing, email us at hello@insg.io and we'll explain it better (and update this page).
Pageview
Every time someone loads a page on your website, that's one pageview. If the same person visits 5 pages, that's 5 pageviews. Think of it like a doorbell — every time someone walks through the door, it rings once.
Visitor (Unique Visitor)
A visitor is one person (well, one browser) visiting your site. If someone visits your site 3 times today and looks at 10 pages total, that's 1 visitor and 10 pageviews. We count visitors per day — so the same person visiting Monday and Tuesday counts as 2 visitors (one each day). This is normal for privacy-first analytics — we don't track people across days because that would require cookies.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors who land on your site and leave without clicking anything else. Imagine someone walks into a shop, looks around for a second, and walks back out without touching anything — that's a bounce. A 60% bounce rate means 6 out of 10 visitors only saw one page. For a blog, 60-70% is totally normal (people read the article and leave). For a SaaS landing page, you'd want it lower.
Referrer
Where your visitor came from before they landed on your site. If someone clicks a link to your site on Twitter, the referrer is "twitter.com". If someone types your URL directly into their browser, there's no referrer — we call that "direct" traffic. This helps you understand which links and platforms are actually sending people your way.
Bot Filtering
INSG automatically filters out known bots, crawlers, scrapers, headless browsers, and monitoring services so they don't inflate your visitor counts. This includes Googlebot, Bingbot, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Puppeteer, Lighthouse, and dozens more. AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) are handled separately — they're tracked as their own channel instead of being dropped, so you can see how AI tools interact with your content. Bot filtering happens server-side on every request before any data is stored.
AI Traffic Detection
INSG automatically identifies visitors arriving from AI platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, etc.) and AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot). These show up as separate channels in your Acquisition tab so you can see how much of your traffic comes from AI tools. No configuration needed — detection happens server-side based on referrer URLs and user agent strings.
AI Analysis
Available on Standard plans and above. The Intelligence tab has an 'Ask AI' box where you can ask questions about your analytics in plain English — like 'What are my biggest friction points?' or 'Which pages should I optimize for conversions?' The AI analyzes only aggregate rollup data (no personal information is ever sent to the model) and returns actionable insights.
Top Pages
The pages on your site that get the most visits. If your homepage gets 500 visits and your pricing page gets 200, they'll show up in that order. This tells you what people are actually interested in — and which pages might need more attention.
Direct Traffic
Visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser, used a bookmark, or clicked a link in an email or app that doesn't send referrer info. Basically, traffic where we can't tell where they came from. It doesn't mean anything is wrong — it's normal for a chunk of your traffic to be direct.
Device Type
Whether someone is visiting from a phone (mobile), a laptop/desktop computer, or a tablet. This matters because your site might look and work differently on a phone than on a big screen. If 80% of your visitors are on mobile, you want to make sure your mobile experience is solid.
Session
A single visit to your site. One person can have multiple sessions — if they visit your site in the morning and again in the evening, that's two sessions. We group pageviews into sessions to figure out things like bounce rate (did they look at more than one page during this visit?).
Time Range / Interval
The period of time you're looking at in your dashboard. "Today" shows data from the current day. "7d" shows the last 7 days. "30d" shows the last 30 days. Longer time ranges smooth out day-to-day spikes and give you a better sense of trends.
Tracking Script
A tiny piece of code (one line of HTML) that you add to your website. It's what tells INSG that someone visited a page. Ours is ~1.6 KB gzipped with default modules (4 on by default, 19 available) — smaller than most images on your site. It doesn't set cookies, doesn't slow your site down, and doesn't collect personal data.
Tracker Modules
INSG has 19 optional tracker modules grouped into 5 categories: Analytics (Web Vitals, outbound links, file downloads, scroll depth, 404 detection), Behavior (rage clicks, dead clicks, scroll hesitation, reading speed, copy tracking, hover aggregates, CTA visibility, keyboard interactions), Technology (JS errors, network hints, mobile insights), Heatmaps (click heatmap, DOM snapshot), and Commerce (product page intelligence). Default config enables 4 modules (~1.6 KB gzip). All 19 enabled is ~6.4 KB gzip. Toggle them on/off per site in Settings.
Site ID
A unique code that identifies your website in INSG. When you add a site to your dashboard, we generate a Site ID. You put it in the tracking script so we know which analytics data belongs to which site. It looks something like "a0d51c8e0346750fe4cce41ce3b75936".
Cookieless / No Cookies
Traditional analytics (like Google Analytics) store a small file called a "cookie" on your visitor's computer to track them. We don't do that. No cookies means: your visitors aren't being tracked across the internet, you don't need an annoying consent popup, and you're automatically compliant with privacy laws like GDPR. No sessionStorage, no localStorage writes either. The tracker has zero client-side storage. The only storage access is reading a localStorage flag for opt-out. The trade-off is that we can't track the same person across multiple days — but for most sites, that's fine.
GDPR
A European privacy law (General Data Protection Regulation) that says you need permission before collecting someone's personal data. Since INSG doesn't collect personal data — no names, no emails, no IP addresses, no cookies — you're compliant automatically. No consent banner needed.
UTM Parameters
Special tags you can add to your links to track where traffic comes from. A link like "yoursite.com?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=launch" tells your analytics that this visitor came from Twitter as part of your launch campaign. Useful for tracking which marketing efforts actually drive traffic. Available on Standard and Pro plans.
Average Visit Duration
How long a visitor stays on your site during a single visit. Measured from when they first load a page to when they leave or close the tab. A 2-minute average is typical for a blog. Higher durations usually mean people are engaged with your content. Note: if someone opens your site and switches to another tab, the timer pauses — we only measure active time.
Real-Time Visitors
The number of people on your site right now (within the last 5 minutes). Shown as a green pulsing dot at the top of your dashboard. Useful for seeing the immediate impact of a social media post, newsletter send, or Product Hunt launch.
Entry Page
The first page a visitor sees when they arrive on your site. Also called a "landing page." If someone clicks a Google result that goes to your blog post, that blog post is the entry page. Knowing your top entry pages helps you understand what's attracting people to your site in the first place.
Custom Events
Actions you want to track beyond pageviews — like button clicks, form submissions, or signups. You trigger them with a simple JavaScript call: window.insg.event('signup', 'pro-plan'). Events show up in your Events tab with counts so you can see how many people took each action.
Outbound Link
A link on your site that goes to a different website. INSG automatically tracks when someone clicks an outbound link, so you can see which external sites your visitors are going to. Useful for affiliate tracking or understanding user behavior.
Product Page Intelligence
An optional tracker module that detects how visitors interact with product pages. Tracks variant/swatch selector clicks, price element hover time (hesitation signal), add-to-cart button hover time, whether visitors scrolled to the reviews section, how long they spent reading reviews, and gallery image clicks. All aggregate — sent as one summary beacon when the visitor leaves the page. Works automatically with WooCommerce selectors.
Mobile Insights
An optional tracker module for touch devices. Tracks tap patterns, pinch-zoom gestures (indicates text/images too small), touch pressure (frustration signal — harder taps correlate with frustration), portrait vs landscape time, and device memory/CPU tier. Only fires on touch-capable devices. All data is bucketed into categories before storage.
Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP)
Google's three key metrics for measuring how fast and smooth your website feels. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures loading speed — how quickly the biggest element on your page appears. Good is under 2.5 seconds. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures visual stability — whether stuff jumps around as the page loads. Good is under 0.1. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) measures responsiveness — how quickly the page reacts when you click or tap something. Good is under 200ms. INSG collects these automatically from visitors' browsers.
Scroll Depth
How far down the page your visitors scroll. Shown as a percentage — 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%. If most visitors only reach 25%, your content at the top isn't compelling enough to keep them reading. If most reach 100%, your content is engaging. Particularly useful for long blog posts and landing pages.
Page Performance Score
A score from 0-100 that rates how well each page on your site is performing. It combines three factors: popularity (how many views it gets, 40% weight), engagement (inverse of bounce rate, 30% weight), and depth (how long people spend on it relative to 3 minutes, 30% weight). A score of 70+ is great, 40-70 is average, below 40 needs attention. See also Smart Scores for the newer system: three scores per page computed daily: Engagement (0-100, how visitors interact), Friction (0-100, signs of frustration), and Conversion Potential (0-100, likelihood of conversion). Computed from aggregate behavioral rollups using rule-based formulas.
Smart Scores
Three daily scores per page: Engagement (how actively visitors interact — scroll depth, reading quality, CTA visibility), Friction (signs of frustration — rage clicks, dead clicks, scroll hesitation, JS errors), and Conversion Potential (likelihood of purchase — CTA visibility, low friction, deep scroll). Scores range 0-100 and are computed from aggregate behavioral rollups. No ML — pure rule-based formulas. Found in the Intelligence tab.
Behavioral Rollups
Behavioral signals like rage clicks, dead clicks, scroll depth, and reading speed are stored as hourly aggregate counts — not as individual per-visitor events. For example, instead of storing 'visitor X rage-clicked button.buy-now at coordinates 340,120', we store 'the <button> element got 5 rage clicks this hour on /products/shoes'. This makes individual identification impossible while still giving you useful UX data.
Annotation
A note you can pin to a specific date on your analytics timeline. Use annotations to mark things like product launches, blog posts, marketing campaigns, or outages. When you see a traffic spike or dip, annotations help you remember what caused it. Like a sticky note on your chart.
Stats Badge
An embeddable image that shows your live visitor count. You can put it on your website, GitHub README, or anywhere that supports images. It updates every 5 minutes and doesn't require authentication — it's a public badge. Find the embed code at the bottom of your dashboard.
Previous Period Comparison
The green or red percentage shown on each stat card (like "+12%" or "-5%"). It compares the current time range to the equivalent previous period. If you're looking at the last 7 days, it compares to the 7 days before that. Green means the metric improved, red means it declined. For bounce rate, lower is better so the colors are inverted.
Interactive Filtering
Click on any row in your dashboard lists (pages, referrers, countries, browsers, devices, etc.) to filter the entire dashboard by that value. For example, click "United States" in your countries list to see only US traffic across all metrics. Active filters show as blue pills at the top — click the X to remove them.
Channel Grouping
Traffic sources automatically grouped into categories: Direct (typed your URL), Search (Google, Bing, etc.), Social (Twitter, Reddit, etc.), Email (Gmail, Outlook, etc.), and Referral (other websites). This gives you a quick high-level view of where your traffic comes from without looking at individual referrer domains.
CSV Export
Download your analytics data as a CSV file for use in spreadsheets or other tools. Click "Export CSV" in the top right of your dashboard. The export includes time series data, top pages, referrers, countries, and browsers for the currently selected time range.
Public Dashboard
A read-only version of your analytics dashboard that anyone can view without logging in. Enable it from the "Public Dashboard" section at the bottom of your dashboard, then share the link. Useful for open-source projects, transparency pages, or sharing with clients.
Stats API
A programmatic way to access your analytics data. Available at /api/v1/stats/YOUR_SITE_ID. Requires either a valid login session or the site's public dashboard to be enabled. You can request specific metrics (counts, timeseries, pages, referrers, countries) or get a summary.
Data Retention
How long your analytics data is kept before being permanently deleted. Free plan: 30 days. Standard: 6 months. Pro: 1 year. Retention is enforced automatically by a daily scheduled job that deletes expired events, behavioral rollups, smart scores, and archived data. Once deleted, data cannot be recovered.
Getting Started
How do I install the tracking script?
Add this one line to your site's <head> tag:
<script defer src="https://sbda.io/tracker.js" data-site-id="YOUR_SITE_ID"></script>Replace YOUR_SITE_ID with the ID from your dashboard. The script is under 2 KB and loads asynchronously — it won't slow your site down. Go to your site's Settings tab to find the exact snippet with your Site ID pre-filled.
How do I add a new site?
From the dashboard, click "Add Site" and enter your domain. Free plans can track up to 3 sites, Standard and Pro get unlimited. After adding a site, copy the tracking script from the Settings tab and paste it into your site's HTML.
Do I need to write code to track events?
No — almost everything is automatic. The tracker captures outbound links, file downloads, rage clicks, dead clicks, scroll depth, scroll hesitation, copy events, reading speed, and Core Web Vitals without any extra code. Just add the script tag.
The only things that need setup:
- 404 detection — add
<meta name="insg-status" content="404">to your 404 page - Custom business events — for tracking actions specific to your site (signups, purchases), call
window.insg.event('name', 'data')
Custom events appear in the Events tab on your dashboard.
How do I use UTM tracking?
Add UTM parameters to any link pointing to your site:
https://yoursite.com?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launchINSG automatically captures these and stores the first-touch attribution. View them in the Acquisition tab. Available parameters: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content.
Pro & Standard Features
How do compliance reports work?
Go to the Compliance tab on your site dashboard. Select which privacy frameworks apply to you (GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, etc.). Reports are generated automatically on the 1st of each month and show your compliance status based on your INSG configuration — no cookies, no IP storage, no personal data collection. Download reports as documentation for audits or legal reviews.
How do email reports work?
Enable email reports from the Settings tab on your dashboard. Choose weekly (sent Monday mornings) or monthly (sent on the 1st). Reports include a summary of your key metrics — pageviews, visitors, top pages, and trend changes — delivered straight to your inbox so you don't have to check the dashboard manually.
How do I share my dashboard publicly?
Scroll to the bottom of your dashboard and toggle "Public Dashboard" on. This generates a read-only URL anyone can view without logging in. Great for open-source projects, investor updates, or sharing with clients. You can disable it anytime.
How do I use the Stats API?
Access your stats programmatically at:
GET https://sbda.io/api/v1/stats/YOUR_SITE_ID?interval=7dRequires either a valid login session cookie or the site's public dashboard to be enabled. Returns JSON with counts, timeseries, top pages, referrers, countries, and browsers.
How do I manage my subscription?
Go to your dashboard and click the account/billing link. This opens the Stripe billing portal where you can update your payment method, switch plans, view invoices, or cancel. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your billing period.
Dashboard Tabs Explained
Overview
Your at-a-glance summary: total pageviews, visitors, bounce rate, and visit duration. The time chart shows trends over your selected period. Stat cards show percentage changes compared to the previous equivalent period.
Content
Shows your top pages, entry pages, and page performance scores. Click any page to filter the entire dashboard by that path. Performance scores combine popularity (40%), engagement (30%), and depth (30%) into a 0-100 rating.
Acquisition
Where your traffic comes from: referrers, channel groupings (Direct, Search, Social, Email, Referral), and UTM campaign data. Click any source to filter. "Direct" includes typed URLs, bookmarks, and links from apps that strip referrer info.
Behavior
Custom events, outbound link clicks, file downloads, scroll depth, Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP), rage clicks, dead clicks, reading speed classification, scroll hesitation, and copy tracking. These modules need to be enabled in your tracker settings — go to the Settings tab to toggle them on.
Technology
Browsers, operating systems, device types, and screen sizes of your visitors. Useful for deciding which browsers to support and whether to prioritize mobile or desktop.
Flows
Visualize how visitors navigate through your site. The Sankey diagram shows page-to-page transitions with proportional flow widths. Entry pages show where sessions start, exit pages show where they end. Auto-detected funnels identify your most common conversion paths and show drop-off rates at each step. Hover over nodes to highlight connected paths, or click to filter. All data is computed from existing session tracking — no additional setup required.
Compliance
Select which privacy frameworks apply to your site (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) and view/download monthly compliance reports. Pro feature — shows a report history with download links for each month.
Common Questions
Why don't my visitor numbers match Google Analytics?
Two reasons. First, we count visitors differently — we use daily estimates without cookies, so the same person visiting Monday and Tuesday is 2 visitors in INSG but might be 1 in GA (which tracks them with cookies). Second, ad blockers block Google Analytics but generally don't block privacy-first tools. So we might actually show more visitors than GA, because we see the traffic that GA misses.
My bounce rate seems high. Is that bad?
Depends on what kind of site you're running. For a blog, 60-80% is totally normal — people read the article they came for and leave. That's not a problem; they got what they needed. For a SaaS landing page, you'd want 30-50%. For an e-commerce site, aim for 20-40%. Context matters more than the raw number.
Why do I see "Direct" as my top referrer?
"Direct" means the visitor didn't come from a clickable link that sends referrer data. This includes: typing your URL directly, using a bookmark, clicking links in emails or Slack/Discord (which often strip referrer info), and clicking links in mobile apps. A lot of your "direct" traffic is actually from links — we just can't tell where. Using UTM parameters on your shared links helps with this.
How accurate are the visitor counts?
They're estimates, not exact counts. We use an HTTP caching technique to distinguish new visitors from returning visitors within the same day. It works well most of the time, but if someone clears their browser cache or uses incognito mode, they'll be counted as a new visitor. All cookieless analytics tools have this trade-off — the alternative is tracking people with cookies, which we don't do. Think of it as "roughly right" rather than "precisely wrong."
Do I need a cookie consent banner with INSG?
No. INSG doesn't set cookies and doesn't store personal data. IP addresses are processed transiently and fed into an irreversible counting structure — they are never stored or logged. Under GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, no consent is required for analytics that don't process personal data. You can remove your consent banner entirely (as long as you're not using other tools that require it).