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Summary reports by email

4Analytics provides extensive reporting from accessible from your website admin backend, however this may not be the most convenient way to access traffic information for all of your users.

First, accessing the backend require logging-in with a username and password. Managers, marketing and other stakeholders may not have any interest into accessing and navigating a Joomla admin only to learn about a few numbers.

Second, granting access to the full website admin may not be the safest thing to do, either for privacy or just to avoid any mishap resulting in deleted content or just plain broken website.

For these reasons, 4Analytics lets you very easily configure email addresses that will receive one or more of summary reports:

  • daily
  • weekly
  • monthly

What information is in a summary report

Only 8 major indicators of the website operation:

4Analytics sample emailed report

 

In many cases, just having these 8 numbers, and how they have changed since the last period is enough for most people. However, you can include links to an online view of both the Simple full report, or the Detailed full report.

Recipients of the emailed reports can click these links and view the full reports online. This is the exact same report you can see by clicking the Show printable link in any admin backend 4Analytics reporting pages.

There are a few important things to know about these links:

  • Users don't need to log in to view reports. They do not need to have any form of password or code. Having the link is enough.
  • Each link shows the exact report it was sent with. For instance, if you receive the daily summary report for December 24, 2024, that link only shows reports for that exact day. If one tries to modify the link to change dates for instance, the modified link will trigger a Not authorized response
  • These links expire 30 days after they have been created
  • Links are optional. You can enable / disable them under Configuration | Reporting

Emailed summary links password reset

Links included in emailed summaries allow viewing analytics information, which may be sensitive. The links use the equivalent of a password for privacy but will keep working for 30 days.

If someone, for instance, leaves your organization and you don't want them to be able to use reports links in emails they already received, you can Reset links password, under Configuration | Reporting.

This will immediately block any existing report links. Only new links, generated after the password change, will work from now on.

Again: users don't need to know that password, it's only used internally by 4Analytics to protect the links.

When are reports sent?

All summary reports are emailed at 2AM the day following the end of the corresponding period:

  • daily reports are sent at 2AM each day, with data from the day before
  • weekly reports are sent at 2AM each monday, with data from the week before
  • monthly reports are sent at 2AM on the 1st of each month, with data from the previous month
Automated email sending and CRON tasks

Reports are sent out automatically using a cron mechanism. You can set this cron mechanism from your server control panel so that your server regularly triggers any background work 4Analytics may have to do. A 5 minutes interval for cron trigger is vaslty enough for 4Analytics.

If you cannot configure an actual cron task from your server, 4Analytics will still send reports. Sending will be triggered by visits on the site frontend. This works well, except if your website has very few visitors. In that case, the 2AM time may not be very accurate, as reports will be sent during the 1st visit after 2AM only, instead of "at" 2AM. This should not change much for your users though, they'll still have their reports in their inbox by morning.

How to enter addresses and configure?

This is all done under Configuration | Reporting.