4Analytics reports in Joomla admin backend

While 4Analytics provides comprehensive data on what's happening on your website, it does not want to drown you under an avalanche of numbers and charts.

Too much data means no data, in fact, which is why all reports have a toggle between Simple and Detailed mode.

All 4Analytics reports fall under one of 4 categories:

• A general summary
• Visitors: who they are
• Sources: where do visitors to your site come from?
• Content: which content on your site is used

Reports navigation

When you arrive at a report page for the first time, 4Analytics will show you the analytics data available for the last completed period.

Data is grouped under Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly reports, so typically if Weekly is selected in the toolbar, 4Analytics will show you data for last week:

Detail level and period selectors

These buttons let you select the details level you require, and the period for which to display reports.

Date selectors

Taking into account the period (day, week, month, year) currently selected, 4Analytics shows you a series of button that you can click to navigate to first, previous, next or last date for which some data is available.

Comparison indicators

Whenever you select a date period, if data is available for the previous period, 4Analytics will show you a variation indicator, whenever pertinent:

These indicators tell you:

• if the value for the current period (day, week, month, year) has increased or decreased
• the percentage of variation
• an icon showing you the direction of change

Click the ? icon next to each data name to view exactly the measurement conditions for this item

 

Only human visitors are counted in most metrics

Most numbers on these reports only take into account humans visitors. They may be quite different from other analytics system you may have that do not separate as well robots and other visitors, good or bad.

Printable version

On all report pages you'll find a Printer icon link. Clicking it opens up a new tab where a visually simpler version of the entire reports set is displayed:

This version of the report is still interactive: you can click on the chart legend for instance, to add or remove items from the chart. Once ready, click the Print button to trigger printing of the report.

Print as PDF

Use your operating system Print as PDF feature to obtain and save a PDF version of any report.

Note that tooltips and help texts are hidden when actually printing the report.

Summary report

If you only use one report, that's the one. It groups together the most important metrics and gives you a quick overview of what's happening on the site.

Summary: Simple

The Simple version looks like this:

Again, we'd suggest you click the ? icon next to each number to learn exactly what's included and what's not in each calculation.

Drill-down from a period to another

If you click on given date in the chart, this lets you see that particular date details for the shorter period.

For instance, if you are looking at the month of January 2025, and then click near the date of January 11, 4Analytics takes you to the week of Jan. 6, 2025 - Jan. 12, 2025. That's the week around january 11.

If you now click again onto that date, you'll be shown the data for the day of January 11.

One metric we consider important is the Engaged number. It's the percentage of pages viewed on your website where the visitor engaged with your content. Engaging means one or more of the following happened:

• they clicked a link
• they pressed one or more keys on their keyboard
• they scrolled down the page at least 50% of the heigh (you can change that number under Configuration | Measuring)

Select which items to show in the chart

Click any item in the chart legend, near the top, to show or hide it from the chart. As charts become quickly unreadable if there are more than 2 or 3 items, this is useful to select your preferred metrics.

Your selection is saved in your browser, so you'll find them when you come back later.

Summary: Detailed

The detailed version of the summary report provides you with additional information, mostly on how your visitors behaved (time spent, returning visits) and errors and bounces.

Visitors report

This reports provide you with information about who your visitors are and how they behave while on the site:

• how much time they spent on your site
• how often they visit and come back later
• how many guests vs logged-in (if you measure that)
• where they come from geographically
• which language they speak
• what sort of equipment they use

Visitors: Simple

In the simple version of this report, you'll find the key indicators: time spent on page and duration of visits, plus geographical origins and language spoken.

Visitors: Detailed

The detailed Visitors report is, well, detailed, so you have many indicators here to grasp who they are.

 

Use percentile instead of averages

While we are all used to using averages, for instance Average view duration, we believe a more accurate and interesting way to measure some metrics is to compute Percentile.

For instance, 4Analytics shows you 75P view duration (or 75th Percentile). In this screenshot example, Average view duration is 2mn 34s but the 75P duration is 3mn 47s which is more then 50% higher!

What this means is: while users spent 2mn 34s on average on a page, 75% of them spent 3mn 47s or more.

We believe P75 numbers give you a more useful information as they show you what happens for "most" people instead of also including extreme values (the exceptional very large or very small value) that shift the result to one side or the other.

In the following section, the User information has an important indicator: New vs Returning visitors. It tells you how many of your visitor (for the current period) are people who never visited your site in the past and how many are coming back, after a previous visit.

That previous visit must have taken place less than 6 months ago to be considered a return. You can change that time period under configuration | Mesuring.

 

And finally their equipment, which is where you may decide to adjust your content technical specification to either match better your audience, or on the contrary update to better atrtact other audiences.

 

Sources report

The Sources report tells you where your visitors comes from. Not geographically but instead where they found you and how they ended up on your site.

4Analytics identifies 5 main sources of traffic:

• Direct: visitor just typed in your site address in their browser address bar, or they have stored a bookmark
• Search engines: they clicked a link in Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo,...
• Other: Another website has a link to one of your pages, and they clicked it
• Social networks: You were mentioned in a social network, and they clicked a link on Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Instagram,...
• AI assistant: Probably a small source of traffic right now but may become more important: an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini,...) offered a link to your site

Sources: Simple

Here is a sample Sources report. In this simplest form, you'll see how much traffic you get from each type of sources, with their evolution during the period you selected:

 

Sources: Detailed

The detailed version of the report includes what you see in the simple version...

 

... but also tells you exactly which site / search engine / social network is sending you traffic, and then for each of them, when possible, which specific page is sending you traffic:

 

It is not always possible to know which site or which page from a site your visitors are coming from, because for privacy reasons this information is often hidden, or partial.

For instance, in many cases, we can know which website sends you visitors, but we don't know from which page of that site exactly. 4Analytics collects that information any time it is technically available.

Content report

This report is where you'll find information on which content on your site attracts visitors.

Importantly, 4Analytics tells you not only where humans are going, but also which pages search engines, AI bots and Social networks bots are loading.

Content: Simple

In the simplest form, the Content report tells you:

• which pages are viewed most
• on which pages your visitors are arriving most often
• which pages they are leaving the site from

 

Content: Detailed

In the detailed form, you also get the number of items and categories your visitors are seeing: is only a small number of articles really successful? What happens if you add more categories?

 

Finally, knowing what visitors are doing is good, but what about Search engines and AI bots?

The numbers in these tables will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing or SEO efforts, to know if you are on the right track.