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
The SBDA engine 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
The SBDA engine 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. AI is used to explain SBDA findings in plain English — turning evidence like 'CTA visibility 22%, bounce rate 64%' into 'Most visitors leave before seeing your buy button.' The AI narrates what the SBDA engine detected. It works from aggregate rollup data only — no personal information is ever sent to the model.
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 under 5 KB gzipped with all modules (all modules enabled by default) — 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
The INSG tracker includes multiple modules that feed the SBDA engine. 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), and Commerce (product page intelligence). All modules are enabled by default (~5 KB gzipped). The SBDA engine uses these signals to detect conversion issues and generate findings.
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. INSG stores no directly identifying data — no names, no emails, no IP addresses, no cookies, no persistent identifiers. No consent banner is required because we don't use cookies or client-side storage.
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 10 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. The tracker automatically captures outbound link clicks, 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. The tracker captures 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. The SBDA engine computes it by combining 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 by the SBDA engine: 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 computed by the SBDA engine: 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, computed from aggregate behavioral rollups. These feed directly into the SBDA rule evaluation that generates findings.
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.
Data Retention
How long your analytics data is kept before being permanently deleted. Free plan: 90 days. Standard: 1 year. Pro: 2 years. 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/t/YOUR_SITE_ID.js"></script>Replace YOUR_SITE_ID with the ID from your dashboard. The script is ~5 KB gzipped with all modules 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=launchThe tracker captures these automatically and the SBDA engine stores 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 Settings tab on your site dashboard. Under Compliance, 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 directly identifying data stored. 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 manage my subscription?
Go to your dashboard and open the Settings tab. Under Billing, click "Manage Subscription" to open 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
Revenue at risk, active findings, affected sessions, and data quality. Shows your top 3 revenue leaks, behavior signals, and recommended actions at a glance. Findings are generated by the SBDA engine from aggregate behavioral data.
Revenue Leaks
All active findings ranked by the SBDA engine's combined impact and confidence score. Click any finding to open the SBDA diagnosis drawer with full details on the issue and its estimated revenue impact.
Behavior
Click heatmaps and behavioral signal breakdown from all active modules (rage clicks, dead clicks, scroll depth, CTA visibility, etc.). All modules are enabled by default. You can toggle individual modules off in your site's tracker settings if needed.
Diagnosis
SBDA diagnostic reasoning — the engine evaluates each finding against behavioral evidence, performs contradiction checks, and computes confidence scores. Click any finding to see the full evidence trail, confidence breakdown, and recommended actions.
Actions
Recommended fixes generated by the SBDA engine, grouped by effort category (Quick win, Design, Engineering) and likely payoff. Prioritized so you can start with the highest-impact, lowest-effort changes first.
Technology
Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP), JS error counts, network quality distribution, and active hours heatmap. Useful for identifying performance issues and understanding when your visitors are most active.
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 on your dashboard 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 generate a one-way hash from the visitor's IP address, User-Agent, and a daily rotating salt. The hash is used to distinguish new visitors from returning visitors within the same day. It rotates at midnight UTC and cannot be reversed. If someone changes browsers or devices, 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 use client-side storage. IP addresses are processed transiently in server memory and hashed with a daily rotating salt into an irreversible anonymous identifier. The identifier is used for visitor counting but cannot be reversed to recover the original IP address. No consent banner is required because we don't use cookies or client-side storage. You can remove your consent banner entirely (as long as you're not using other tools that require it).