Analytics: visitors, sources and enquiries

#Where to find it

A project's tabs sit in a row of words under its name in the top bar, and Analytics comes after Studio. It has five views: Data, Pages, How people find you, Money and members and Settings, and opens on Data. Until the site is published, the tab simply says No visits yet: visits are counted once it is. After that, visitors appear within seconds.

Everyone in the workspace can open Analytics, Viewers included, and ask the month's free questions about visits. Adding notes, goals and steps, making shared links and changing settings needs an Owner, Admin or Editor. Clearing the data is for Owners and Admins only.

#Every site at once

Analytics in the sidebar, under Agents, adds up every published site in the workspace. It opens on 30 days, and the buttons at the right of its heading switch to 7 days or 6 months. Four tiles give Visitors, Page views, Enquiries and Visitors who enquired, each with its change on the period before. A chart draws visitors and views for all the sites together, day by day, or week by week over six months.

Under the chart, By site lists each published site with its address, visitors, page views and enquiries, busiest first, and its change in visitors on a wide screen. Click a site's name to open its own Analytics tab over the same range, with every panel this page describes. Until a site is published, the page says No published sites yet.

A reseller workspace with client workspaces also gets a Client analytics button beside the range buttons. The view comes with a paid plan: every client site over the last 7 days or 30 days, whole days, against the days before. Sites whose visits stopped, or jumped in the last day, come first under Needs a look, then By visitors, then Quiet for sites with no visitors or no goals set. A site's name opens its own tab when you are a member of that client's workspace.

#How visits are counted

Briks adds a small counter to every page it publishes. It sets no cookies, keeps nothing on the visitor's device for counting and stores no visitor's address. Each visitor gets an id made from their browser and network that changes every day and can't be matched to any other day, and the figures are kept for 25 months. That's why counting is described as designed to need no consent banner in most countries. It is a careful design, not a legal ruling: some countries read the rules more strictly, and an A/B test sets a cookie of its own, so check what your own privacy notice needs. For stricter countries there is Strict counting, covered under Settings below.

• Not counted: search crawlers, link previews and other bots, automated browsers (Briks' own checks of your site included), and browsers set to ask sites not to track them.
• Your own visits are counted until you opt out, once per browser. The settings section below shows how.
• Your visitors can opt out too. When Briks writes a privacy page for your site, it adds a short paragraph about counting with a Don't count my visits link, the same mark you use for yourself.
• Place: the country, plus the city and a position rounded to about ten kilometres when they are known.
• Days run midnight to midnight in your workspace's time zone, the one its agents' schedules use (UTC unless it was set otherwise). Each visitor's id still changes at midnight UTC, so someone reading at that moment counts as two visitors.

#Choose a date range

The range button at the top left opens the choices. The tab opens on Last month.

The address in your browser follows every change of range or filter, so you can bookmark a view or send it to a teammate.

#The live globe

At the top, a globe shows everyone on the site in the last five minutes as pulsing markers, refreshed every five seconds while the tab is in view. Beside it are the Live count, Reading now (pages open at this moment) and From (the top five places). Drag the globe to turn it.

#The headline numbers

Each tile shows its change on the period before, and the line under the tiles names that period: the same hours of yesterday for Today, the month before for Month to date, and the same length of time just before for the rest. Green means better, so a falling bounce rate shows green.

#What changed

The card at the top of Data sums up the last 7 whole days against the 7 before in two to four lines: the figures that moved, what explains most of it (a channel, another site, a campaign, a page, a country or a device), and what happened meanwhile, such as a publish, a change an agent asked for, an article, a post, a campaign, an A/B test, the site not answering, a move in Google positions or an AI assistant starting to name your business. Click a line to open the view that shows it.

The figures and what happened are worked out from your site's own counts and history; only the wording is written for you, and any sentence whose number isn't in those figures is left out. A move small enough to be chance is never told as a change, and a site with fewer than 50 visitors in both weeks reads Too few visits to say what changed. It is worked out once a day. The Monday email starts with the same kind of summary for its week, and each traffic alert carries one for its hours.

#Ask about your visits

Under What changed, the Ask about your visits card takes a question in plain words, up to 500 characters, and answers it from this site's own figures. Three examples ask at a press: “How many people came from Google last month?”, “Which page brings the most enquiries?” and “Why did Tuesday spike?”.

The first 100 questions each calendar month (UTC) are free for each site, and the card shows how many you have used. After that, each question holds 1 credit while it is answered and is charged what it cost. Only Owners, Admins and Editors can ask past the free ones. A question the card cannot turn into figures is told so and is not counted. Questions about visits written in the studio conversation are answered from the same figures (see Asking questions).

#The chart and your notes

Visitors and views draws visitors as bars and page views as a line, with the period before dashed. Hover over or tap a bar to read it. On a day by day chart, click a day to open it hour by hour; a Day: chip at the top takes you back.

Publishes are marked on the chart for you. To mark something yourself, such as a leaflet drop, click Add a note, pick the Day, write up to 200 characters in Note and click Save note.

#Every panel, one by one

The panels below the chart appear once the range has at least one page view.

Every row is also a filter. Click a page, a channel or a country and the whole tab narrows to it. The filter shows as a chip at the top: click is to turn it into is not, or the cross to remove it. Only visitors who enquired narrows everything to the people who got in touch, the quickest way to see which pages and sources bring you work. On a paid plan, Download CSV saves the current view as a spreadsheet file.

#Goals and steps to an enquiry

Enquiries are a goal from the start, with nothing to set up. Add your own when something else matters, such as reaching a booking page or downloading a price list. A goal is picked from lists of what your site has, never typed as code: Visited a page, Pressed a button, Sent a form, Downloaded a file and Went to another site. The lists hold what visitors did in the last 90 days, so a page appears once it has been visited and a button once it has been pressed. A site keeps up to 20 goals.

Steps to an enquiry follows visits through 2 to 6 steps in order, within one visit: for example the home page, then the prices page, then a form sent. Each step shows how many visits reached it after the one before, as a share of step 1, and where the rest went next, including Left the site. Until you set your own, the steps are suggested from your site's pages. Change the steps lets you pick each one from the same lists as goals, Add a step, and Save steps; Use the suggested steps goes back. Shared links show goals and steps too, read only.

#UTM tags: telling campaigns apart

A UTM tag is a label you add to the end of a link you share, so your site knows which post, email or advert sent each visitor. Nothing needs installing: add the tags to the link and Briks reads them when the visitor arrives.

• utm_source: where the link sits, such as instagram or newsletter.
• utm_medium: the kind of channel. social counts as Social; email or newsletter as Email; cpc, ppc, paid or display as Ads.
• utm_campaign: the campaign's name.
• utm_content: which version of the link, such as bio or story.
• utm_term: a keyword, mostly for search adverts.

#The Pages, How people find you and Money views

Pages reads one page at a time over the same range and filters as Data, a goal included. Pick the page in Page, and choose Every visit or Visits that enquired. How far visitors read shows the share of visits that saw each section of the page, or how far down it was scrolled on a page built before section marks existed. What visitors press lists links and buttons by their words and the section they sit in, with Presses that went nowhere for things people press that do nothing. Where forms are left gives each form's visits that Reached it, Began it and Sent it, and the fields that stopped people, never what anyone typed. Page speed lists each page on phones and computers, worst first.

How people find you groups visits by the way they came in: Search, AI assistants, Social and campaigns and Other sites, each with its visitors, how many enquired and the change on the period before. Under AI assistants, Named in their answers shows how often assistants named your business when asked your buyers' questions, once the AI search agent is hired (see Search engines). Social and campaigns counts the posts published from the project's Marketing tab and your tagged links.

Money and members shows what your site's own code counts, such as bookings, with where those visits came from. Revenue appears once the site takes payments through your own processor, and members the day after it has sign-in for visitors; until then it says No sales or members yet. See Sign-in and payments.

#Settings

• Collection. Count visits to the published site is on by default. A change reaches the site at its next publish, and a Publish again button appears so you can apply it now. No AI runs and nothing is charged.
• Strict counting, in the same group, records fewer details for countries with stricter rules: where visitors came from (other sites, campaigns, ads), A/B tests and the map's positions are left out, and figures under 10 show as “fewer than 10”. It is on by default for a site with a French or German address. On a .de address the pages carry no counter at all, and page loads are counted on the server from the next publish, without time on page or button presses.
• Emails. Weekly email and Traffic alerts, both on by default. The next section explains them.
• Your own visits. Don't count me opens your site with a mark that keeps that browser out of the figures, and the page confirms it. Do it once in each browser, and again at each address you use. Count me again undoes it.
• Shared links. A read-only view of the figures for someone outside the workspace, such as an agency or an accountant, with no sign-in and hidden from search engines.
• Client report, on paid plans. Type Your client's email and click Send monthly: on the 1st of each month at 08:00 your workspace time, once the site is in production, they get last month's figures, what changed, where visitors came from and what your agents did, in your agency's name and logo when your workspace has a brand. The email links to a report they can print or save as a PDF, through a shared link of its own listed under Shared links. Open last month's shows it to you, and Stop ends it.
• Export, on paid plans. Download as a spreadsheet saves totals, each day or week, and the top pages, channels and countries for a range you pick, as a CSV file. Download everything saves every list of the Data view (up to 500 rows each), each day's figures, what your site's own code counted, and every counted view and event of the range, as spreadsheets in one .zip.
• API, on paid plans. Make a key gives you one read-only key for this project's figures, shown once, to use from your own server or reporting tools. Using the API shows a ready-made call and the ranges and filters it takes; keys answer at most 60 calls a minute. New key replaces it and Revoke stops it.
• Key on the site, in the API group, on paid plans. Put a key on the site gives your site's own server code a read-only key to these figures, as the secret BRIKS_ANALYTICS_KEY, with the API's address as BRIKS_ANALYTICS_URL. It is kept on the published site only. If the site moves to a new address, put a new one on it.
• Clear analytics data, under Danger zone. Deletes every counted view and event for good. Owners and Admins press Clear data and type the project's name to confirm.

Where the studio can read Google's own search figures, Settings also has a Google Search group: the address to add as a user of your site's property in Search Console, then Connect. Once connected, the searches your site is shown for appear under How people find you.

#Emails about your visits

Both emails start once the site is in production. They go to the person who created the project, or to the workspace's first Owner if that person has left. Each has a link at the foot that turns it off without signing in, and you can turn it back on in Settings.

• Weekly email: every Monday morning, covering the Monday to Sunday before. Visitors and enquiries with their change on the week before, the pages read most, where visitors came from, and any questions the chatbot passed on. Nothing is sent for a week with no visitors in it or in the week before.
• Traffic alerts: Briks checks every hour and emails you when visits stop (the site may be down or its address broken) or jump well above the usual, judged against your site's own normal traffic. At most one of each kind a day. The same notice shows at the top of the Data view as Visits have stopped or Busier than usual.

#Reading the numbers honestly

• Visitors over a long range run high. A regular who reads your blog every morning is a new visitor each day. Compare ranges of the same length rather than reading the number as a headcount.
• Two people can look like one. Two colleagues on the same office network, with the same browser, on the same day, share an id.
• Expect lower totals than some other tools. Bots, automated checks and privacy minded browsers are left out.
• Small numbers swing. Going from 4 enquiries to 8 shows as doubling. Give a change a few weeks before judging it.
• Count yourself out first. On a new site, your own checking can be most of the traffic.