Installing Active Analytics takes about two minutes. Understanding what you’re looking at afterwards is what this guide is for.
Each section of the Active Analytics dashboard tells you something specific about your site’s traffic. This guide explains every panel, what the numbers mean in plain language, and what action (if any) each metric should prompt.
Accessing Your Dashboard
After installing and activating Active Analytics, your analytics appear in two places:
- WordPress Dashboard widget — a compact summary visible as soon as you log into WordPress admin (if the dashboard widget is enabled in settings)
- Active Analytics main view — the full dashboard, accessible via the Active Analytics menu item in your WordPress sidebar
All data is collected automatically from the moment the plugin is activated. There is nothing to configure to start seeing data. If you have just installed the plugin, allow 24–48 hours for a meaningful picture to build up.
The Dashboard Overview Panel
The top section of the Active Analytics dashboard shows your site’s traffic at a glance for the configured date range (default: last 90 days).
Users
This is the count of unique visitors to your site within the selected period. Because Active Analytics is cookieless, “unique” is determined by a combination of anonymised IP and session data rather than a persistent browser cookie. A visitor who returns to your site after their session expires will be counted as a new user.
What to do with this: Track the trend over time, not the absolute number. Is your user count growing month on month? Steady growth means your content or marketing is working. A sudden drop is worth investigating (check your referrers to see if a traffic source has dried up).
Pageviews
The total number of pages loaded by all visitors in the selected period. One user visiting three pages counts as three pageviews.
What to do with this: Compare pageviews to users. A high pageviews-per-user ratio means visitors are browsing multiple pages — a positive engagement signal. A ratio close to 1.0 means most visitors view one page and leave (common for blog posts that answer a single question).
Overview Graph
The main chart shows users and pageviews over time, either by day or by month depending on the date range selected. Hover over individual data points to see exact counts for a specific day or month.
What to look for:
- Regular weekly patterns are normal (most sites see lower traffic on weekends)
- Sudden spikes usually correspond to a specific event: a social share, a newsletter, a link from a popular site, or a Google ranking change
- Gradual upward trends are the goal
- Sudden drops that persist for more than a few days warrant investigation
You can configure the overview period in Settings → Active Analytics: the default is 90 days for the overview graph and 12 months for the monthly view.
The Real-Time Panel
The real-time panel shows visitor activity on your site right now — updated live as you watch.
Live Pageviews
The current number of active sessions on your site. This updates every 30 seconds by default.
What to do with this: Most useful during and immediately after a specific event — publishing a new post, sending a newsletter, running a promotion. The real-time panel shows whether the event is driving immediate traffic and which pages are receiving it.
Live Referrers
Which sources are sending visitors to your site right now. If you see a referrer you don’t recognise, check it — it may be an unexpected mention, a link from a forum or community, or a new backlink worth following up on.
The Top Pages Panel
This panel lists your most-visited pages over the selected period, ranked by total pageviews.
Each row shows:
- The page URL (clickable to open the page)
- The page title
- Total pageviews for the period
What to do with this:
Your top pages are the content your audience finds most valuable — or, more precisely, the content Google and other referrers are sending people to. Use this list to:
- Protect what’s working: Your top pages should be kept up to date, internally linked from other content, and given priority in any site redesign
- Find content to update: A page that used to be in your top 10 but has dropped is a candidate for a refresh
- Understand your audience: If your most-visited pages surprise you, it tells you something about what your visitors actually want versus what you think they want
The Top Referrers Panel
This panel shows which external sources are sending traffic to your site: search engines, social platforms, other websites, newsletters, and direct traffic (visitors who typed your URL directly or followed an untracked link).
Each row shows the referrer domain and the number of visits from that source.
What to do with this:
- Search engines at the top is the target for most content sites. If Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo are your top referrers, your SEO is working.
- Social platforms show which communities engage with your content. If a platform is consistently in your top 5, it is worth investing in that channel.
- Specific site referrals are worth investigating. A blog, directory, or community consistently sending you traffic is a relationship worth nurturing — consider reaching out, linking back, or collaborating.
- Direct traffic being very high can indicate a strong returning audience, or can indicate that many links to your site are untagged (email, PDFs, apps).
You can configure the number of referrers shown in the panel via Settings → Active Analytics (default: 10).
The Traffic Graph Panel
A separate day-by-day traffic chart covering a longer period than the overview — by default, 365 days. This gives you the longer-term picture of traffic trends.
What to look for:
- Year-on-year growth: If your site has been running for more than a year, compare the same months across years
- Seasonal patterns: Many sites see consistent seasonal dips and peaks (e.g., news sites drop in August; retail sites spike in November)
- Post-migration effects: If you redesigned your site, changed your URL structure, or made a significant technical change, check this graph for any impact on traffic
The Device Breakdown Panel
A simple split showing what percentage of your visitors are on desktop versus mobile devices.
What to do with this:
- If mobile is above 60%, your site must be excellent on mobile — test your product pages, checkout flows, and forms on a phone
- If desktop dominates, that is unusual for most sites in 2026, and worth understanding (it may indicate a B2B or developer audience, or simply that your content is not mobile-optimised and mobile users bounce before being counted)
- Use this data to prioritise which device experience to test and optimise first
The Content Report Panel
The Content Report shows every page on your site with its view count for the last 30 days, along with a sparkline — a tiny inline chart showing the day-by-day trend for that page over the past month.
This is one of Active Analytics’ most practical panels for content decision-making.
Reading the sparklines:
- Flat sparkline: Traffic is consistent day to day. Typical of pages with stable organic rankings.
- Rising sparkline: Traffic is growing. Good news — investigate why and replicate it.
- Declining sparkline: Traffic is falling over the past month. Worth investigating: has the page dropped in rankings? Has the referral source changed? Is the content dated?
- Spike then flat: A single event (a share, a mention) drove temporary traffic that didn’t persist. The page has not built an ongoing audience.
What to do with this:
Use the Content Report as your weekly content health check. Sort by views to see what’s performing. Look for pages with declining sparklines — these are your content optimisation priorities. Look for pages with flat but high views — these are your most reliable traffic assets.
For a detailed walkthrough of the Content Report workflow, see: How to Use the Active Analytics Content Report to Find Your Best WordPress Pages →
The Internal Links Panel
This panel shows which internal links on your site are being clicked most frequently — the links within your content that send readers from one page to another on your own site.
You can configure how many internal links are tracked via Settings → Active Analytics (default: 5 per page).
What to do with this:
- High internal link clicks indicate effective cross-linking — readers are following your recommendations to other content
- If important content is getting zero internal link traffic, it may be poorly placed in your navigation or rarely linked from other posts
- Use this data to improve your internal linking strategy: make your best content easier to reach from your highest-traffic pages
The Events Panel
If you have configured event tracking using the wpaa() JavaScript function, your tracked events appear here. Each event shows the category, action, label, and count.
Events let you track interactions that go beyond page views: button clicks, form submissions, file downloads, video plays, WooCommerce add-to-cart actions, and any other user behaviour you define.
For setup instructions, see the Active Analytics Event Tracking documentation →
The Statistics Panel
A summary panel showing aggregate numbers for the selected period: total users, total pageviews, and a month-by-month or day-by-day breakdown in table form. Useful for reporting or for periods where you want exact figures rather than charts.
Settings: Configuring What You See
All display options are in Settings → Active Analytics → General Settings:
- Days in Overview Graph: Default 90 days. Increase to see a longer trend; decrease to focus on recent performance.
- Months in Overview Graph: Default 12. Set to 24 for a two-year view.
- Days in Traffic Graph: Default 365. This is the detailed day-by-day graph.
- Number of top referrers: Default 10. Increase if you have many referral sources to monitor.
- Number of internal links to consider: Default 5. Increase to track more internal link activity.
- Data retention: Default 2 years. Data older than this is automatically purged by WordPress CRON.
- Collect data about logged-in users: Default off. Enable only if you specifically need to track admin or member activity.
A Simple Weekly Review Routine
For most site owners, a five-minute weekly check covers everything you need:
- Glance at the Overview panel. Are users and pageviews up or down versus last week?
- Check the Top Referrers. Any new or unexpected sources sending traffic?
- Scan the Content Report. Any pages with declining sparklines that need attention?
- Check real-time if you published something this week. Is it getting picked up?
That is a complete analytics workflow for a content or small business site. You do not need to check it more frequently than this unless you are running a specific campaign or have just published something.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my user count seem lower than I expected?
Cookieless analytics counts sessions rather than persistent browser identifiers. Returning visitors are counted as new users if they return after their session ends. This gives a more conservative but also more accurate count — it is not inflated by ghost traffic or bot sessions the way GA4 can be.
Why do I see different numbers than GA4 showed?
GA4 data is affected by consent rejection (many EU visitors are never tracked at all), ad-blockers (GA4’s scripts are widely blocked), and data modelling (GA4 fills gaps with modelled data). Active Analytics counts actual requests to your server — unaffected by blockers or consent. The numbers are different because the methodology is genuinely different, not because one is wrong.
Can I export my data?
Your data lives in the wp_wpaa_visits and wp_wpaa_events tables in your WordPress database. You can export these via phpMyAdmin, a database management tool, or any WordPress database export plugin.
Does Active Analytics slow down my site?
No. The tracking script is asynchronous and non-blocking. It does not delay page rendering and makes no external requests. The WordPress Dashboard widget loads additional data when you open WordPress admin, but this does not affect front-end performance.
Explore Active Analytics: Plugin overview and pricing →
