Insights: Your Visitor Stats

Insights, in your admin's sidebar, shows how many people visit your site, where they come from and which pages bring in enquiries. It's on every plan, including Free, and needs no setup. It counts without cookies.

What you'll see

• Totals for the last 7, 30 or 90 days, each compared with the period before.
• Day by day: visits and enquiries as two small charts. Hover over a bar for that day's number.
• Where enquiries come from: each source with its visits, enquiries and enquiry rate, with the sources that bring in the most enquiries first.
• Campaigns and referring sites: the names of tagged ad and email campaigns, and the other websites that send you visitors.
• Pages: each page's views, the visits that started there, and the enquiries sent from it.

Your dashboard also shows the last 7 days in one line, and the Pages list shows each page's views and enquiries for the last 30 days.

What the numbers mean

• Visit: someone arriving at your site. One person who comes back three times is three visits, because nothing is stored to recognise them.
• Page view: every page loaded, including the second and third pages of a visit.
• Enquiry: a form sent successfully, from any form on your site.
• Enquiry rate: enquiries per visit. On the Pages table it's enquiries per page view, since a page isn't always where a visit starts.

Where a visit comes from

Each visit is given one source when it arrives:

• Google search, Bing and other search engines: someone clicked an ordinary search result.
• Google Ads and Microsoft Ads: someone clicked one of your ads.
• Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the other social networks.
• Email: a link in an email, including links opened in Gmail or Outlook on the web.
• Other websites: a link on someone else's site. Campaigns and referring sites shows which.
• Direct: someone typed your address, used a bookmark, or followed a link from an app that doesn't say where it came from.

The source stays with the visit as someone moves between your pages, so an enquiry sent from the third page they looked at still counts for the search or ad that brought them in. Occasionally the source is lost along the way, for instance when a visitor's browser has JavaScript switched off, and their later pages show as your own site. If someone copies an address into a new tab, that counts as a new, direct visit.

Seeing your campaigns by name

Insights recognises the standard tags that marketers add to links, so you can tell one campaign from another:

• Google Ads. With auto-tagging on (the default), every ad click is recognised as Google Ads. To see campaign names as well, add utm_campaign=your-campaign-name to the ad's Final URL suffix.
• Emails and social posts. Add tags to the link, for example https://yoursite.com/offer/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=october. A medium of email counts as Email, cpc from Google counts as Google Ads, and a source such as facebook counts as that network. Anything else appears as Tagged campaign links.

On each enquiry

Every enquiry also notes how that person found you, for example Google Ads · kitchen remodel · landed on /free-estimate/. You'll see it under the message in your inbox and at the bottom of the notification email. Any campaign tags on the link they arrived from (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content and utm_term) are kept with it, under Campaign tags.

These details stay with the enquiry and nowhere else. The totals above only ever record the source and the campaign name. Ad click IDs such as gclid are never stored: they're used to tell that a visit came from an ad, then discarded. Because the enquiry now records how someone found you, mention it in your privacy policy alongside your contact form.

What isn't counted

• Your own visits while your browser is signed in to the admin. To see Insights working, open your site in a private window or on your phone.
• Search engine crawlers, link previews and other bots.
• Pages a browser loads ahead of time, the page editor's previews, and your "page not found" page.

Privacy

Insights sets no cookies, stores nothing on your visitors' devices and keeps no IP addresses or anything else that could identify someone. Every number is a daily total, and the numbers stay on your site. They're never shared with us or anyone else. Days run midnight to midnight UTC, and numbers are kept for 400 days.

To credit an enquiry to the right source when someone browses first, links within your site briefly carry a label such as ?via=google_ads, which disappears from the address bar as the page loads. The label is the same for everyone who came the same way, so it can't identify anyone. There's more in Privacy & Usage Data.

To stop counting, clear Count visits and enquiries under Settings → Privacy.

Insights or Google Analytics?

For most small sites, Insights answers the everyday questions: is anyone visiting, where from, and is it bringing in work? Google Analytics goes further. It shows the path people take through your site, the devices and places they visit from, and much more, and Google Ads can use it to aim your ads at the people most likely to enquire.

The two work side by side. If you'd like Google Analytics as well, import the ready-made GA4 setup.