See Exactly How Your Users Are Navigating Your Site
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Do you want to see exactly how users are navigating your site?
Accurate user data is key to making smart decisions that improve engagement rates and boost your conversions.
However, popular analytics tools like Google Analytics often miss the full picture as ad blockers prevent their scripts from running.
That means you’re stuck making choices with incomplete data, and this can seriously hurt your site’s growth.
In this article, we’ll share a better tool that gives you complete, accurate data so you can easily see how users are navigating your site.
Problems with Traditional Tools like Google Analytics
Traditional analytics tools give you huge amounts of data, but it’s hard to sort through and nearly useless.
First, many new-age browsers like Brave and Vivaldi have ad blockers enabled by default. There are also countless ad blocker extensions that users can easily install on popular browsers like Google Chrome and Safari.
These ad blockers prevent analytics scripts from running, which means you are missing a significant chunk of visitor data without even realizing it.
Another issue is third-party cookies. Most analytics tools rely heavily on them, creating privacy concerns and huge gaps in your data. And if you’ve recently tried using Google Analytics 4, you’ve probably noticed it’s gotten much more complicated and at the same time less useful.
Even seasoned, experienced users have a hard time finding simple metrics like page views and referral traffic.
On top of this, many traditional tools only show you isolated page views, not the full picture of a user’s journey through your site. This makes it impossible to pinpoint exactly where visitors convert or where they drop off.
And these tools completely fail to track users accurately across multiple devices. If someone starts browsing on their phone but finishes their purchase on a desktop, you will never connect those dots.
Luckily, there’s a better option that addresses all these issues and gives you clearer, more accurate insights into exactly how your visitors are navigating your site.
How to Get Accurate WordPress Analytics
Unlike traditional analytics platforms, AnalyticsWP uses first-party tracking to record every visitor interaction directly on your own server.
This means you get complete, accurate data that’s entirely private and fully in your control.
One of the best things about AnalyticsWP is its simplicity. There’s no setup at all. You simply install the plugin, activate it, and it instantly starts tracking your visitors. Plus, everything lives right within your WordPress dashboard, so you don’t have to log in to another platform to check your site’s marketing metrics.
If you’re running a WooCommerce store, AnalyticsWP gets even more powerful. It automatically integrates with WooCommerce to track detailed customer activities. You can see the source of your orders as well as the entire conversion journey.
It also seamlessly tracks form submissions and integrates with form plugins like Fluent Forms, WPForms and Gravity Forms, and more. And if you’re using popular page builders like Elementor or Divi, you’re covered too.
Installing AnalyticsWP is simple, with no complicated settings or configurations. You just activate it, and you’ll immediately start seeing user data.
Now that you understand why traditional analytics fall short, let’s explore three easy ways to see exactly how users navigate your site.
For each method, we’ll give you step-by-step instructions along with a real-world example so you can apply these lessons to your site today.
1. The Analytics Dashboard
The simplest way to see your site’s activity is right in the AnalyticsWP dashboard. Just navigate to AnalyticsWP → Dashboard in your WordPress admin, and you’ll instantly get a clear snapshot of what’s happening on your website.
Here’s what you’ll see at a glance:
- Current active visitors: See exactly how many people are browsing your site right now.
- Unique visitors count: Know exactly how many individual people visit your site over a given period.
- Total page views and average page views per visitor: Understand your visitors’ engagement by seeing how many pages they typically view.
- Window shopper rate: Quickly identify visitors who check only one page and then leave your site.
You get more than basic metrics, and with powerful data filtering options you can quickly set your preferred date ranges, like the last 7 days, the last 30 days, and even custom ranges.
Plus, you can use advanced queries to dig deeper into your data:
- Filter by UTM parameters, referral sources, device types, and more.
- Use matching rules like “equals,” “contains,” or “starts with” to pinpoint exactly the visitors you want to see.
- Combine multiple filtering rules using “AND” or “OR” to create complex queries.
You can also save your custom filters under My Filters for quick access later.
Real-World Example
Let’s say you want to know which referral traffic source between Facebook and Twitter brings more engaged visitors.
With AnalyticsWP’s dashboard, you can easily set up a quick query to compare visitors from these two platforms side by side.
Instantly, you’ll see which source drives higher engagement, helping you make smarter decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts in the future.
2. Complete User Journey Analysis
Unlike traditional tools that mostly show isolated data like page views, the User Journey feature helps you clearly see the full user journey.
This includes their first landing page all the way through to conversion and beyond, even if months go by between visits. It provides deep insights into every page your visitors viewed, the devices they used, and exactly which actions they took on your site.
You can find all these details by navigating to AnalyticsWP → Journeys in your WordPress admin. On this page, you’ll see small circles, each representing an individual user journey.
These journeys are organized into three categories:
- Anonymous Journeys: These are users who visit your site without logging in.
- Identified Journeys: These are users who visited and logged in to your site. If the user has any previous anonymous events, AnalyticsWP merges the events with their identified sessions, even across different devices.
- Conversion Journeys: These are users who completed a specific action, like making a purchase or submitting a form.
You can further filter these journeys by selecting date ranges like “All Time,” “Last 7 Days,” or “Last 30 Days,” or by specifying a minimum number of events per journey.
If you’re running a WooCommerce store, AnalyticsWP gives you a complete timeline of your visitors’ actions, from their initial visit, through every interaction, to the final order and beyond.
Real-World Example
Let’s say you run an online store selling custom T-shirts.
A visitor clicks on a Facebook ad and lands on your homepage from their mobile phone. They browse multiple products, read customer reviews, create an account, add some items to their wishlist, and then leave without buying.
Later, this same visitor returns to your site on their desktop and logs in.
AnalyticsWP automatically merges the events from their initial mobile session with this new desktop activity, giving you the full journey.
These combined insights help you understand exactly what influenced their decision to buy, and you can use this information to improve your site’s user experience for future visitors.
3. Real-Time User Behavior
AnalyticsWP also comes with a Live Events feature that lets you watch how visitors interact with your site as it happens. You can navigate to AnalyticsWP → Live Events in your WordPress dashboard, and you’ll instantly see real-time activity from your users.
Real-time tracking is especially useful when you’re running live campaigns, limited-time sales, or testing new features on your site.
You get an immediate view of user actions, like clicks on your calls to action, page views, and even how users move through your sales funnel.
You’ll also see detailed timelines for individual users, showing each event clearly as it occurs. This makes it easy to spot exactly where users engage most or identify areas causing visitors to bounce.
Real-World Example
Let’s say you’re launching a flash sale on your website.
As soon as the sale goes live, you jump into AnalyticsWP’s Live Events page.
Immediately, you see users flooding your landing page. Some visitors quickly click through to add items directly to their cart, while others scroll down, possibly looking for more product information.
At the same time, you notice a group of visitors bouncing away within seconds. Using this live insight, you can quickly spot potential issues like unclear messaging or slow-loading elements, and then make real-time tweaks to boost conversions before the sale ends.
Final Thoughts
You now know how to get complete, accurate, and easy-to-understand insights right inside your WordPress dashboard, removing any guesswork about user engagement, helping you make smart decisions to improve conversions and drive more growth.
Unlike Google Analytics and other traditional tools that miss crucial data due to ad blockers, privacy concerns, and poor design, you can now get comprehensive analytics that capture every visitor interaction, directly inside WordPress.
Since all data is stored on your own server and captured through first-party tracking, you maintain full control of your information while respecting the privacy of your users.
This approach not only helps you stay compliant with increasingly strict privacy regulations, but also ensures you’re making decisions based on complete data rather than the fragmented, useless piles of data that traditional analytics provide.