Web analytics dashboard

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The web analytics dashboard provides an overview of your website's traffic.

For the selected time range, it starts with the number of visitors, views, sessions, along with trends for each, as well as average session duration and bounce rate. Each of these is compared with the previous time range, showing how much they increased or decreased.

Web analytics dashboard

Bounce rate

A bounce is a session where the user only had one pageview, no autocaptures, and spent less than 30 seconds on the page. Your bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that resulted in a bounce.

PostHog uses autocaptured events to calculate this. To make sure this value is accurate, make sure you enable autocapture and are capturing both $pageleave and $autocapture events.

Paths

Top paths and top entry paths drill down into specific pages on your site to show their views, visitors, bounce rate, and scroll depth. You can click on any of the paths to filter the dashboard for that path.

Web analytics dashboard

Scroll depth

Both average scroll and deep scroll rate are calculated using how far a user has scrolled down the page and how much content has scrolled into view.

  • Average scroll depth is the average scroll percentage across pageviews.
  • Deep scroll rate is the percentage of users who scroll far enough down a page to view 80% of the content.

Referrers, channels, UTMs

To get an idea of where users are visiting your site from, you can see top referrers, channels, and UTM values.

Web analytics referrers

Channel types

Based on UTMs, referring domains, and more, PostHog automatically classifies traffic into specific acquisition channel types such as:

Channel TypeDescription of where the user came from
DirectTyped in the URL directly or used a saved link.
Paid SearchAn ad from a search engine, e.g. Google, Bing, or Baidu.
Paid SocialAn ad from a social media platform, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
Paid VideoAn ad from a video platform, e.g. YouTube or Twitch.
Paid ShoppingAn ad from a shopping platform, e.g. Amazon or eBay.
Paid OtherAn ad from an unknown platform.
Cross-NetworkA cross-network ad
Organic SearchA non-ad search result from a search engine, e.g. Google, Bing, or Baidu.
Organic SocialA non-ad link from a social media platform, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
Organic VideoA non-ad link from a video platform, e.g. YouTube or TikTok.
Organic ShoppingA non-ad link from a shopping platform, e.g. Amazon or eBay.
AffiliateAn affiliate link.
ReferralA referral link.
EmailA link from an email.
DisplayA display ad, e.g. an ad on Google Display Network.
SMSA link from an SMS.
AudioAn audio ad, e.g. a podcast ad.
PushA push notification.
OtherA link from an unknown source.
Web analytics channel types

Read more: How channel type is calculated

UTMs

UTMs include source, medium, campaign, content, and term. Each are set as URL parameters and autocaptured by PostHog. For example, the following URL has the source of twitter, medium of social, and campaign of twitter-campaign:

https://posthog.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twitter-campaign

Setting UTMs correctly is crucial for accurately classifying your traffic, not only for UTMs, but for channel types as well.

Read more: How to capture, customize, and filter UTM parameters

World map

The world map shows where your users are located, but you can also select it to show top countries, regions (like California, England, or Ontario), or cities.

Web analytics regions

Retention

Retention creates a cohort of unique users who performed any event for the first time in the last week. It then tracks the percentage of users who return to perform any event in the following weeks.

Web analytics retention

Read more: Creating and understanding retention

Filtering your dashboard

Like other dashboards in PostHog, the web analytics dashboard is filterable. This means you can filter for data with certain event or person property values. Options include browser, path name, device type, country, and UTMs. Just click the "Add filter" button next to the date range at the top of the dashboard.

This enables you to dive into specific stats for regions, parts of the site, and specific marketing campaigns.

For more complex queries, you can still use the product analytics tab as usual.

Questions?

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FAQs

Have a question not covered here? Let us know . What is the difference between web analytics and product analytics? Web analytics is a streamlined experience for tracking and monitoring your most important website metrics. Product analytics is a more powerful and flexible experience for tracking your product. Web analytics relies on a subset of the events and properties used by product analytics. This means you can use both in tandem. How much does web analytics cost? Web analytics is no…

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