Traffic measurement options

While Tracking rules let you decide which pages and visitors should be measured, this page lets you change the way 4Analytics actually measure things.

These options are pretty specific, and it should be rare that you have to modify them. If you do, remember that they only apply to measurements made from the moment you change them. They normally do not apply to past measurements.

Apply all analytics configurations

You can use this toggle to enable or disable with one click all Tracking rules. That way, you do not have to disable them individually.

When set to No, 4Analytics does not do anything on the site: tracking script is not inserted into pages anymore, and any measurement data received is discarded.

Use geographic IP database

4Analytics offers two ways to identify where your visitors are located: using their timezone, or with an IP address database:

Timezone

When a visitor views a page from your site, 4Analytics can read the timezone configured in their browser. From the timezone, it can figure the country they are in.

This is the simplest, but also a very accurate way of finding out where visitors are from but the accuracy is limited to their country.

IP address database

Since version 3, 4Analytics can integrate an IP addresses database to identify visitors location.

By looking up the visitor IP address in this database, 4Analytics reads and stores country, region and city for each visitor.

So you get more details, and while accuracy will be very good in general, it's not perfect. You will likely have a few misplaced records, for region and city. That should not have any measurable impact on your statistics.

4Analytics uses the Geolite2 data IP address database created by Maxmind (available at https://www.maxmind.com). This database is distributed under the Creative Commons Corporation Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Both for legal reasons, the database is not included in the 4Analytics zip file you downloaded, or in any automatic update to 4Analytics. Instead, after installation or enabling this feature, 4Analytics downloads and stores the database file in the /media/com_foranalytics/vendor/maxmind/ directory on your server. A few times a day, it will also check if any update is available. If so, the updated file will be downloaded automatically and replace the previous one.

If you disable this feature, 4Analytics will stop checking and downloading updates.

Views, visits and users detection

• New user detection: How much time must pass before a returning user is considered again a new one. If a user only comes back to your website after, for instance, 6 months, they will be considered a new visitor. This is what decides the breakdown of New vs Returning visitors on the Visitors report

• Visits duration: a visit is when the same visitor loads a series of pages consecutively (a view), within a short period of time. This option decides how much time must pass between 2 consecutive page loads for the second one to start a new visit. The default value of 30mn is common across analytics platforms, which is why we use it as the default.

Visitor engagement

One key metric 4Analytics provides you in reports is how many page views are Engaged. A visitor engages with a page when they:

• stay long enough (but not too long) on the page
• click something
• type something on their keyboard
• scroll down the page

Engagement is a key metric because it tells you whether your visitors actually find your content useful

While we have sensible default values for all these parameters, feel free to change them based on your specific use case. As before, changes to these values can only affect measurements made after the change.

• Minimum page view duration: Page views that are shorter than the selected duration will not be counted at all. For instance, if a visitor only stays on a page for 1 second, this is probably a bot, or they did not actually look at the page. Either way, we are likely better just not couting this view
• Maximum page view duration: Page views that are longer than the selected duration will be counted with an unknown duration. For instance, if a visitor stays on a page for 30 or 45 minutes, this is probably a browser window that was left open without anyone looking. Again, we likely do not want to count this page view at all
• Minimum scrolling to trigger page engagement: By default, 4Analytics will consider that scrolling down a page constitutes engagement from the user if they scroll 50% or more of the page height. You can change that, or disable engagement based on scrolling entirely. If so, only clicking a button or link, or typing on the keyboard will constitute engagement

Visitors exclusions

Exclude non-important bots

This should be left enabled unless you actually want to measure bots traffic on the site, and not real, human traffic.

As mentioned in the tooltip, search engines, AI assistant bots, social networks bots and a few others are not concerned by this option. Their traffic will always be measured.

Exclude visitors from these IP addresses

If you are the owner of a website, or maybe the administrator, it is common to want to remove yourself from measurements, to avoid interfering with actual users traffic measurement.

This is done very easily under the Exclude visitors from these IP addresses field. Enter one or more IP addresses in the list and 4Analytics will not measure anything when you visit the site from these IP addresses.

You can exclude visitors by IP addresses or User agent strings already in the Tracking rules configuration. If you exclude IP addreses in the Measuring configuration page, the exclusions will apply to all rules. If you do it in a tracking rule, the exclusion will only apply to that particular rule.

This is made even easier by using the Exclude your current IP addresses button just below that field:

After clicking that button, 4Analytics automatically insert your current IP addresses in the input field. Both IP address version 4 and version 6, if available, are added.

Exclude visitors with these User-Agent strings

You can exclude visitors by User agent strings already in the Tracking rules configuration. But this global configuration is more convenient if you have IP addresses that you always want to exclude

Measurement script

4Analytics automatically insert into your website pages the small bit of javascript (less than 2KB) it needs to do its job. There are 2 possible ways to do that:

• the default is to insert the code directly inside the HTML page. It's the easiest and fastest, and there should be no reason to change that
• disable this option to make 4Analytics instead link to a javascript file, assuming you have a reason for it such as "optimizer" extension breaking 4Analytics or similar not-so-good reasons