Plausible Analytics Changelog

You can now get an email (or a Slack alert) when there’s an unusually high number of current visitors on your site 🚀

Thanks to the Changelog team for suggesting this and helping us build it 🙌

Here’s how to enable it for your site and how to set up Slack alerts too.

We now have a dark theme! 🌃

We follow your system theme by default but logged in users can manually choose either system, dark or light theme in the account settings.

Thanks @nurodev for the initial theme design and @Vigasaurus for making it come alive!

You told us you loved the sticky header concept so it is now live! 😍 It makes it easier to:

• See the chosen time period and switch dates
• See the chosen filters and clear filters
• Get a filter drop-down menu when using many filters
• “This Month” is now “Month to Date” with a comparison to the previous period

Thanks to @Vigasaurus for helping us build this!

By default, Plausible tracks every page you install the snippet on. You can now manually exclude specific pages from being tracked. Here’s how.

You can now navigate and analyze your Plausible dashboard even faster by using keyboard shortcuts. Here are the shortcuts that we do support.

Our private and secure shared links have a new format which makes them easier to bookmark and access again for your clients. If password protected, the password is saved so the client doesn’t need to type it on each visit. Any existing shared link will automatically redirect to the new one.

Pageview goals are now more powerful. You can use rules to group different pages or create goals for dynamic URLs. Track all the blog posts by using /blog** or track Woocommerce checkout pages for your ecommerce by using /checkout/order-received/*. Full details in the docs.

You can now find Entry Pages and Exit Pages in the “Top Pages” report. Click on the “details” button to get extra insights including visit duration for visits started on a specific entry page and exit rate percentage for individual pages.

Want to showcase your stats to your visitors? Or want to integrate Plausible into your custom built client area? You can now do so by embedding the dashboard. See instructions here.

Plausible Stats API is now out of beta! It offers a way to retrieve your stats programmatically. It is a read-only interface to present historical and real-time stats. Take any metric that you want, present it wherever you want in whatever shape you want. More details in the API docs.

Time on page for your individual pages is now live in the Top Pages report! Have fun exploring!

If you’re concerned about adblockers, we’ve now made it easy to serve our script through a proxy and get more accurate stats. See the instructions here.

You can now invite team members to view the stats and manage the sites you have added to your account. Learn more about users and roles.

You can now also transfer the ownership of a site to a different Plausible account. See how the site ownership transfer works.

You can now use the plausible.local.js extension if you want to count visitors on localhost. This is also useful in Cordova, Capacitor and other hybrid apps. Learn more here.

There’s now the “Add filter” button in the top right of your dashboard that makes filtering even more powerful.

It adds extra functionality so now you can search for any metric (easy way to find that specific page), exclude certain segments of traffic (see all traffic outside the US for instance) and group your pages too (analyse your blog posts separately from the rest of the site).

Click on the “Add filter” button to explore or read more here.

In addition to the stats API and the sites API, we now also have the events API. You can use it to record pageviews and custom events. This is useful when tracking mobile apps or for server side tracking. Learn more here.

When filtering by a specific goal, in addition to the overall conversion rate (CR), you can now see CR for other metrics too. This makes it easier to discover the best converting campaigns, referral sources, landing pages, articles, countries and devices at a glance.

Click on the download icon on the top right of your Plausible dashboard. It will export a ZIP file which includes CSV files of the individual reports. You can then import your stats into Excel or other data analysis tools.

You can even export a filtered view. Filter your dashboard by any metric to get an export of that particular view. Segment the dashboard by any goal such as external link clicks, 404 error pages or custom events to download those metrics.

We automatically send email receipts after a successful payment, but you can now also find your invoices in your Plausible account settings. In the top right menu, click on your account name and choose “Settings”. To download your invoices, find the “Invoices” section.

In addition to the UTM Source, Medium and Campaign, you can now also count clicks and conversions from UTM Term and UTM Content. Find them all in your Top Sources report.

Not familiar with UTM tags? Learn how to use them to uncover direct/none traffic.

Happy New Year! Thanks to your support, we’ve collected $19,356 in 2021 and we’ll donate 100% of it to a handful of open source and environmental projects over the next few weeks 💚

Oh, by the way, regions and cities are now live in your Plausible dashboard!

You may have heard about the ruling by the Austrian DPA that the use of Google Analytics and other US-owned cloud services violates the GDPR as they’re “subject to surveillance by U.S. intelligence services and can be ordered to disclose data of European citizens to them”.

Plausible is incorporated, built and hosted in the EU. All site and visitor data we collect on your behalf is exclusively processed with servers and cloud infrastructure owned and operated by European companies. You can learn more here.

In addition to the 404 error pages and external link click tracking, Plausible can now automatically track when a visitor clicks a link leading to a file. All the most common file extensions are tracked by default, but you can also specify a custom list of file types to track. Here’s how to enable file download tracking.

Universal Analytics, the current version of Google Analytics, will be sunset and will stop counting stats on July 1st 2023. There’s no way to import your historical Universal Analytics stats into the new Google Analytics 4, so we’ve put a lot of effort into making a Google Analytics stats import tool ourselves.

You can now import your historical Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) stats into your Plausible dashboard. The stats are imported from your first Google Analytics visitor until your first Plausible Analytics visitor. Learn more here.

You can now choose a different metric to display on the top graph. You can display one metric at a time, you can also choose not to display the graph at all, and we save your last selection for your next session.

We’ve improved the way we handle international sites:

• Umlauts and other special characters (including numbers, dots and slashes) are supported so you can add international domain names to Plausible
• We automatically display the time format (24-hour or 12-hour am/pm) for the top graph timeline based on your browser’s defined language
• We’ve improved how we deal with international time zones and daylight saving time changes

P.S. We’ve reached $1M ARR and are counting stats on 66,000+ sites with 2 billion pageviews per month between them. We’re now a team of 8 solely funded by our 8,000+ subscribers. Thank you for your support! ❤️

You can now set a different interval on the top graph to get a deeper level of detail and make it easier to spot trends. We will save your last selection for your next session too.

We’ve made our custom events simpler for sites that use CSS classes. You can now add a CSS class name to any element on your site to start tracking conversions. Details here.

Does your site use the ID attribute instead? It’s now simpler to set up custom events with ID attributes too. See an example in our Webflow instructions here.

P.S. “Direct / None” traffic is now shown in the main view of Top Sources as well. Happy holidays!

You can now find two brand new metrics in your dashboard: “Total visits” (Sessions) and “Views per visit” (Pages/Session).

We’ve made several less prominent enhancements too. A more accurate cities report, a more accurate screen size report, a more mobile-friendly top graph and improvements to the speed, consistency and stability of our service. For a comprehensive overview of all the changes we make daily, check out our GitHub.

P.S. Thanks to the support of our 9,500+ subscribers, we collected $58,000 in our donation fund last year. Thank you for helping us make a bit of a difference! ❤️

You can now filter your stats by multiple countries, pages, sources and more, all at once.

This is useful to group specific geographical regions, separate organic search traffic from other sources and segment your audience to your needs.

Click on the “Filter” button in your dashboard to start exploring.

Domain name changes just got easier! 🎉

Visit your site settings and update your domain name directly. No need to reach out to us for help anymore.

The instructions are here.

P.S. We’ve got a new WordPress developer on board so we just released a new version of our plugin. It now tracks file downloads, custom events can be setup using CSS class names, you can exclude pages and user roles from being tracked and more. Details here.

You can now compare your stats over time. Compare to the previous period, year over year or a custom period. Match by day of the week to avoid any discrepancies caused by the weekend.

You can filter your dashboard any way you wish to analyze a segment of your audience over time. You can also change the chart interval for a more granular comparison view. And if you’ve imported your historical Google Analytics stats, you can compare against those too.

Select “Compare” in the date picker or press the “X” key on your keyboard to start comparing.

Learn more about the comparisons here and have fun exploring!

We’re celebrating the end of Google’s Universal Analytics by announcing three new features:

• Funnels: You can now follow the visitor journey from a landing page to a conversion with our multi-step funnel analysis.

• Revenue goals: You can now assign monetary values to custom events and track marketing revenue attribution for your ecommerce store.

• Custom props for pageviews: You can now attach custom properties to pageviews too and open up a whole new range of use cases: stats by user role, login status, language, author, category and more.

These features will become a part of our new business plans later this year. They’re free-to-use during the preview but will be exclusive to business plan subscribers after that. More details will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

You can now find a dedicated tab for “Properties” within the “Goal Conversions” report of the dashboard. This tab provides a list view of all the custom properties you’re collecting, both at the custom event and the pageview levels.

To see all properties in the list, you must first explicitly add them in the “Properties” section of the site settings, similar to how it works for custom events themselves. You can add all the existing properties with a single click.

This feature also gives you the flexibility to choose which properties you want to display (or not) in the dashboard list, similar to the control you have over custom events.

We’ve made some improvements to the “My Sites” page:

• You can now search for any of your sites
• There’s a graph for an overview of the traffic
• And a comparison to the previous period so you can see the trend

Take a look. Have fun exploring!

Since the launch in 2019, we’ve continuously worked to improve our product and infrastructure. We now have 8 full-time team members and several paid external contributors. We don’t have any investors, so all this is solely funded by the fees our 12,038 subscribers pay us. Thank you for your trust and support! ♥️

One of our commitments has been stability in pricing. Nobody likes price hikes, so we’ve refrained from increasing the cost of Plausible subscription for our loyal subscribers so far. We plan to continue with that approach.

In light of this, we’ve just introduced our new “Business” subscription plan. The “Business” plan is designed to offer more advanced business features while helping us cover our costs.

If you want to keep access to these premium “Business” features, which currently include funnels and ecommerce revenue, you can upgrade to the new plan with the latest pricing. If you upgrade to the new plan, the amount you’ve already paid for your current subscription will be adjusted for the remaining time, ensuring you only pay the difference.

If you don’t need these additional features, you’re welcome to continue on your current plan, paying the same amount as you used to. Regardless of your plan choice, we will continue investing in our product, infrastructure and team to bring you an even better experience in the future.

On a related note, we’ve launched a new feedback section to keep you updated on Plausible’s development and to hear your input. It lets you see what’s new and what we’re working on next. You can also vote on existing ideas or suggest new ones. Check it out.

Do you have any questions or need any help? Please contact us. Thank you!

You can now pin sites that you want to feature at the top of your sites page. You can pin up to nine sites. The most recently pinned site will automatically appear at the top of your list, helping you organize your dashboards by how often you use them.

Your pinned sites will also show up in the site switcher list that you can see within each dashboard by clicking on the site name in the top left. You can navigate between the sites in the site switcher list using keyboard shortcuts 1 to 9.

You can now enable two-factor authentication (2FA) as an extra security layer for your Plausible account in your account settings. You can read more details here.

We’ve been working on improving our bot detection. We now:

• Block traffic based on the User-Agent header
• Filter out known referrer spam domains
• Block traffic originating from data centers
• Detect and exclude unnatural traffic patterns

All this is enabled for all sites out of the box so you don’t need to worry about having bots in your stats.

P.S. Today marks 5 years since we launched Plausible! Thanks to your trust and support, we’ve grown to a team of 8 and have counted more than 73 billion pageviews in a privacy-friendly way! ❤️

Do you send custom properties alongside pageviews and custom events?

You can now segment your audience by multiple custom properties. Just keep selecting additional custom properties in your dashboard as you’re filtering.

You can use the filter button on the top right of the dashboard to do the same too. There we’ve also added the “contains” option for even more powerful segmenting.

P.S. It’s now easy to exclude your internal traffic from being counted in your stats. See how.

We’ve improved the accuracy of the “Locations” report. Visitors that use VPN services are now grouped under the “Anonymous VPN Service” entry in the Countries tab. This eliminates noise that VPNs add to locations and makes it easy to view the percentage of your visitors using VPNs.

On a related note, it’s now possible to block traffic from particular countries from being recorded in your dashboard. This is a more permanent option compared to our filtering which allows you to temporarily exclude traffic from some countries when doing reporting. See more here.

P.S. January not only marked our 5th anniversary but it was also our best month yet in terms of MRR growth! We’re celebrating these milestones with our first logo redesign in all this time.

You can now click on the “Conversion Rate” and the “Total Conversions” metrics in the top graph to view the trend over time.

These metrics have now also been added to the “visitors.csv” file in the CSV export. And “conversion_rate” is now also available in the stats API.

You can now filter your stats by hostname. This allows you to view a global overview of traffic across all hostnames as well as segment traffic by individual subdomains all in the same Plausible dashboard.

It’s possible to apply a hostname filter both by using the filter button in the dashboard and through the stats API.

Learn more about hostname filtering.

Do you see some unwanted hostnames in your list? You can validate the origin of your traffic and block all unwanted hostnames. This feature is in addition to being able to block traffic by IP address, country and page. See how to block specific origins of traffic.

It’s now possible to import both UA and GA4 properties into the same Plausible dashboard. We’ll automatically detect time ranges to prevent double counting of periods and to avoid any gaps in the data. You can learn how our Google Analytics import works here.

We’ve improved our CSV export functionality. You can still export any segment of your audience directly from the dashboard but now you can also perform a full export from the site settings without any limits on the number of entries. See more here.

And you can now also import external data using CSV files. The CSV import supports Plausible data by default but can also be used to import data from other sources if the external data is formatted according to our guidelines. See the full details.

Note that our Google Analytics importer is still the recommended option when looking to import the data from UA and GA4. And if you’re looking to transfer a site from one Plausible account to another, the transfer ownership functionality is the recommended way.

Our GA4 import functionality now imports your custom events data as well. If you’ve previously imported the GA4 property and now wish to include your custom events, please delete the previous import and do a new import. Details here.

We’ve also improved the process of adding custom events as goals in your site settings. You no longer need to manually add events one at a time and can now add all existing events with a single click. More here.

You can now filter your dashboard by page, country or device and see the keyword terms for that segment of your audience. We now also display impressions, CTR and position for each search term.

Haven’t connected your Search Console to Plausible yet? See how to do it here.

There’s now a testing tool to help you check if Plausible has been integrated correctly. It sends test traffic to your site to ensure that everything is working. And if we encounter an issue with your integration, we will provide tips on how to fix it.

You can find the testing tool both as part of the onboarding process for a new site and directly in the site settings of any site. Learn more.

We’ve made some improvements to the imported data from UA, GA4 and CSV:

1. Filtering imported data: You can now filter imported data directly from the dashboard and within the stats API. Please note that due to its nature, the imported data filtering capability is limited compared to our native data filtering. Details here

2. Exporting imported data: You can now export imported data using the CSV export and the stats API

You can now segment your audience by “does not contain” in addition to “is”, “is not” and “contains”.

Explore the “Filter” menu where you can also search for anything or filter traffic by multiple entries (say multiple countries or multiple referral sources).

Note that when you view a specific audience segment, your marketing funnels are filtered to show only the activity from that segment.

In addition to the traffic spike email alerts, you can now enable traffic drop alerts as well. This can be useful to notify you if your site has a technical problem, an issue with your Plausible integration or some trouble with the marketing campaigns you’re running. See more here.

Have you set up some funnels to help you boost conversion rates? You can now edit funnel steps or rename any of your existing funnels directly from your site settings.