Plausible Analytics

You can track ad performance without tracking people.

Click a Google or Microsoft ad and the landing URL includes:

?gclid=... ?msclkid=...

Those are unique click identifiers. Useful for attribution, but they create GDPR concerns when collected without consent.

Plausible strips the unique ID automatically and keeps what you need: the traffic source.

You can still view and filter clicks from Google Ads or Microsoft Ads.

✅ No personal identifier stored ✅ Campaign insights preserved

Fourth record-breaking month in a row.

June delivered our highest new MRR and most paying subscribers ever.

Zero spent on ads.
Zero paid to affiliates.
Zero shortcuts taken.

This is what happens when you just keep building.

Location reports just got better.

Now you can see bounce rate and visit duration for each country, region, and city.

Not just where your traffic comes from, but how engaged those visitors actually are.

Most traffic visiting your website is not human.

If your analytics counts everything, you don’t know what’s real.

Clean data matters more than big data.

A bunch of referral sources that used to show up as plain text now have proper icons.

Small change, but it makes your traffic sources list much easier to scan. ✨

Most SaaS companies hide their limitations. We just made a page listing ours.

It's not anti-marketing, it's clarity.

Plausible is built for a specific customer and there are some things that we'd never do:

- Individual user tracking
- Session recordings
- Retargeting
etc.

We'd rather lose a sale than gain a frustrated customer.

One of the questions we ask before building anything:

"Does this help people understand their website?"

If the answer is instead:

• watch people
• profile people
• retarget people
• collect invasive data

...it's probably not something we'll build.

Analytics should help you understand your site.
Not profile visitors.

Google Gemini traffic ≠ Google Search traffic.

Mixing them inflates your organic numbers and hides how AI is actually finding you.

In Plausible, they're tracked separately:

• Gemini → AI Assistants
• Google Search → Organic Search

Your reports stay accurate. No guessing.

We just shipped one of the most requested improvements:

Subdomain visibility in the Pages report.

If you're tracking blog.yoursite, app.yoursite, etc., you can now break them down by URL and see exactly where visitors are landing.

One script. One dashboard. Unified sessions across main domain and subdomains.

✓ Already working on your existing data.

Plausible has supported keyboard shortcuts for years.

The custom date range calendar was one of the few places where the experience wasn't fully keyboard-first.

That's fixed now.

Plausible User Journeys lets you analyze entire sections of your website, not just individual URLs.

Looking at blog? Choose "📁/blog" to see visitor paths across all blog posts combined, not each post separately.

Or choose a specific blog post directly.

Your pick.

Same for /docs, /products, or any other section.

You get a clearer view of how different parts of your site contribute to conversions.

Some companies buy attention on “best Google Analytics alternative” pages.

Plausible has never spent a cent on ads, affiliates or paid endorsements.

When people recommend us, it is because they chose to. That trust is worth more than any placement we could buy.

Thanks for all the positive feedback on the new AI Assistants channel! We also took the opportunity to improve traffic source classification across Plausible.

Many referral URLs that previously appeared as "Referral" traffic are now grouped under their appropriate channels. For e.g.,

- Kagi is now classified as Organic Search
- Several Mastodon instances, Bluesky domains and Threads referrals are now classified as Organic Social.

We hope this helps make Plausible a bit more useful!

AI assistants traffic just got their own channel in Plausible!

Includes ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Phind, and Grok (previously under organic search).

Cherry on top: Works retroactively with your historical data. Enjoy!

We added a free ad cost calculator to help you measure what matters. It also serves as a useful extension to those tracking ad campaigns in Plausible.

Input your numbers:
→ Ad spend
→ Clicks
→ Impressions
→ Conversions

Get instant metrics:
→ CPC (cost per click)
→ CPM (cost per mille)
→ CPA (cost per acquisition)
→ CTR
→ Conversion rate

https://plausible.io/ad-cost-calculator

🆕 Transferring sites in Plausible just got easier.

All transfer options are now in one place. Move your site to:

→ another team
→ your personal sites
→ another Plausible account

No more hunting around. Quick, straightforward, done.

1,000 visitors hit your pricing page.
200 signed up.

Funnels tell you 800 dropped off.

But User Journeys shows you where those 800 went instead.

Pick a starting point that you're most curious about, and start exploring the journeys your visitors take from there.

Live now in the Explore tab 💜→

Sentry ditched Google Analytics for Plausible in 2024. Removed all ad cookies.

Two years later: Still cookie-free. Still no GA. No going back.

Your website traffic is your asset.

It shouldn’t be repurposed, resold or mined.

Analytics should serve you.

We just saw a day with 200+ signups for the first time ever in the history of Plausible!

Biggest contributors: Google, ChatGPT, and word of mouth as usual!

Thanks for giving privacy-friendly analytics a try. 🫶

ChatGPT has overtaken Reddit and X as a traffic source for PR newsrooms, and is now the #6 referrer!

While Google still dominates by a huge margin.

The web’s distribution layer is changing fast.

👉 Data from Prezly, after analyzing thousands of sites using Plausible.

You trust the numbers you see on your GA dashboard.

But a huge chunk of your traffic never made it there because people declined the consent banner.

Exactly how much? The real numbers will blow your mind.

For a site with:
- 100K monthly reported visitors by GA, and
- consent acceptance rate of 55% (the global average)

You're losing ~981,816 visitors from your analytics every year!

Calculate the real cost for your site → https://plausible.io/cookie-banner-traffic-loss-calculator

Wrapping up April with numbers we've never seen before!

First time crossing 4k trial signups and 1k new paid subscribers in a single month. 🎉

Still no growth hacks, just organic growth doing its magic. Thanks for showing us love. 🫶

If your “conversion rate calculator” is:

→ a Google Sheet
→ with 7 tabs
→ and 3 broken formulas

we made something for you.

3 dead-simple calculators.

No setup.
No clutter.

Just answers: https://plausible.io/conversion-rate-calculator

User Journeys is finally taking shape 😍👇

Why does Facebook show up 12 times in your campaign report when you only ran 3 ads?

Inconsistent UTM parameters. One person writes "Facebook" with a capital F. Another uses "facebook" lowercase. A third accidentally adds a space. Your analytics splits them into separate entries, making trends impossible to spot.

We built a UTM checker to fix this. Drop your link in, get instant feedback on formatting issues, and copy a cleaned-up version.

https://plausible.io/utm-checker

Now you can create UTM links directly in Plausible 😄

https://plausible.io/utm-builder

Google Analytics serves Google first. You get what's left over.

That's why the interface changes in ways that don't help you. Why simple features take years (if they arrive at all). Why privacy compliance falls on your shoulders.

Their strategic goal is feeding the ad machine and collecting data.

Your goal is understanding your visitors.

Those don't align.

Free tools cost you in other ways.

Startup culture celebrates hustle.

• 16-hour shifts
• Late nights
• “Always grinding”

What it ignores:

• Decision fatigue
• Chronic stress
• Losing interest in something you once loved

So instead of pushing harder, we cut the things that don't matter. Both in the product and in our working culture.

We don't believe in outworking others. But building things that solve real problems.

Result: More clarity. Better decisions. Better sleep.

Our stats comparisons are much more accurate now!

Until now, “today vs previous day” meant comparing a partial day to a full one…which is why today's traffic always looked like it was declining.

That’s fixed.

Now, we compare today to the same time yesterday so your comparisons are much more accurate, consistent and fair!

Still want the old behaviour? (see next post)

Comparing stats for only equal time ranges?
"7 days vs 7 days," "30 vs 30."

In Plausible, you can also compare unequal time ranges, like:

• 3-day weekend sale performance vs that full week
• A launch week traffic spike vs that full month
• Summer break dip vs last quarter

Better comparisons → better insights.

We just added strict order funnels to Plausible.

You can now require visitors to go from one step to the next with no other actions in between.

Perfect for measuring tightly defined conversion paths without noise.

Learn more: https://plausible.io/docs/funnel-analysis

Today, we came one major step closer to building "user journeys" (our most requested feature).

We're as eager to ship this as you are to use it.

This 6-year signup graph felt worth sharing.

From near zero to 109k unique signups.

Without viral moments, growth hacks or ads. Trust the process.

Most form analytics tell you *that* someone converted. They don't tell you *where*.

Now you can see exactly which page your form got submitted on. Just click on your "Form: Submission" goal to reveal details.

- It's codeless.
- It's simple.
- It's insightful.
- Works with almost any form integration.

Try turning on form submissions tracking from your site settings, if not already!

Most 'privacy-first' tools still track you.

We make sure your data stays on EU servers.
We proxy services like Gravatar so no personal data leaks.
We don't even track email opens or clicks.

That's what privacy-first actually means.

Stripe shows up as your #1 referral source? 🚩

That's not a win. That's broken attribution.

You're giving credit to a checkout redirect, not the channel that actually brought the customer.

Plausible fixes this by tracking the original source.

When someone converts, you see what really drove the sale:
→ Organic search
→ Your newsletter
→ A referral link
❌ Not the payment processor.

So you know exactly where your revenue is coming from.

17,000+ teams are now paying for Plausible Analytics!

That's thousands of people free of surveillance scripts, cookie banners and complex dashboards.

Cherry on top is that 17K subscribers gives us something rare:
• We can stay independent
• We can keep building privacy-first analytics
• We can say no to things that don’t align

Thank you all for the support!

A surprising thing about website analytics:

Most teams look at fewer than 5 metrics regularly.

Yet analytics tools track hundreds.

More data doesn’t create better decisions.

Clarity does.

Everyone tells you to hire fast. It "feels" like growth.

We’re 10 people, seven years in.

No hiring sprees.
No layoffs.
No cycles of expansion and contraction.

Just careful additions when the work demanded it.

Most of the team that joined early is still here. A couple moved on when their paths changed.

Continuity doesn’t feel dramatic while it’s happening, only later do you realize how much it shaped the company.

Claude has been climbing up in our list of referrals contributing to signups, and has the highest conversion rate!

Not the biggest in volume yet, but definitely the most qualified audience we're getting.