Siteimprove Traffic Analytics FAQ

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What is Siteimprove Traffic Analytics?
• How do I enable Traffic Analytics on my account?
• What features are included in Traffic Analytics?
• Can I view Traffic Analytics data in my CMS Plugin?
• What cookies will be set if I use Traffic Analytics?
• Are IP addresses of visitors collected when Traffic Analytics is enabled?
• Where can I find privacy and security information?
• What data are we pulling via the Traffic Analytics integration?
• Where does Siteimprove store the data?
• How long does Siteimprove keep the data?
• Do I need to filter out crawler bot traffic?

What is Siteimprove Traffic Analytics?

Traffic Analytics is an addition to the Siteimprove platform that helps you prioritize issues to be addressed on your website. It shows analytics data collected over the previous 30 days throughout the platform; Quality Assurance, Web Accessibility, and SEO, to allow you to focus on the issues found on the most popular pages.

How do I enable Traffic Analytics on my account?

There are a few ways to enable Traffic Analytics. 

• Add the Siteimprove Analytics (SA) script to your website - You can add the code to your website in order to enable the Traffic features. For instructions on this, see Adding Siteimprove Analytics JavaScript to your website.
• Integrate with Google Analytics (GA) - If you already have GA running on your website you can set up an integration to enable traffic. See How to enable Google Analytics Traffic data integration.
• Integrate with Adobe Analytics (AA) - If you have AA running on your website you can set up the integration to enable traffic. See Siteimprove Adobe Analytics integration guide.

Please contact your Customer Success Executive or submit a request if you need help in enabling Traffic Analytics.

You can currently only set one Traffic Analytics provider per site but you could set up multiple Traffic Analytics Providers under one account. For example, you could have Site A setup with Siteimprove Analytics, Site B setup with Google Analytics, and Site C setup with Adobe Analytics. You cannot have Site A setup with both Siteimprove Analytics and Adobe / Google Analytics though.

What features are included in Traffic Analytics?

Traffic Analytics includes the following features to help you make better-informed decisions when prioritizing issues to be addressed:

Fix errors on popular pages first

The main feature of Traffic Analytics is that you can see page views on page tables throughout the platform. 

We display page view data so you can focus on addressing the issues on the most popular pages. For example, to see accessibility issues on popular pages, go to the Main menu > Accessibility > Issues > Pages with Issues tab. Here you can sort the table by page views. More examples are listed in the paragraph below.

Examples of where Traffic Analytics data can help you manage tasks

Quality Assurance

• QA > Summary > Traffic / Priority Pages
• QA > Links > Pages with broken links (Page Views)
• QA > Inventory > Pages

Accessibility

• Accessibility > Issues  > Specific issue or Pages with Issues tab
• Accessibility > Potential Issues > Specific issue or Pages with potential issues tab 
• Accessibility > Resolved Issues > Specific issue or Pages with resolved issues tab 

SEO

• SEO > Optimize > Issues and Recommendations > Pages or Issue / Focused Issues / Resolved Issues > Pages
• SEO > Optimize > Target pages (SEO Advanced)
• SEO > Research > Keyword discovery (SEO Advanced)
• SEO > Keyword Monitoring (SEO Advanced)

Policy

Displays if you 

• Policy > My policies > Policy > View Policy Details

Data Privacy 

• Data Privacy > Personal Data Inventory > Personal data > Personal ID Numbers > Pages
• Data Privacy > Personal Data Inventory > Personal data > Phone Numbers > Pages
• Data Privacy > Personal Data Inventory > Personal data > Email Addresses > Pages

See broken links that have had the most clicks - "Clicks on broken links"

Note: This information is not always available in Google and Adobe Analytics, see Why are there sometimes no “Clicks on broken links” when using third-party data providers?

Traffic Analytics allows you to sort broken links by the number of times they have been clicked. To view this information from the main menu, go to Quality Assurance > Links > Broken Links.

Focus on the most popular documents

Note: "Clicks on Documents" are not supported for Google Analytics or Adobe integrations because Documents typically don't contain the Siteimprove script. Only clicks to broken documents that redirect to a 404 page (which does have the script) are tracked.

Traffic Analytics allows you to see the most popular document visited on your website. You can then ensure that these documents are valid and free from errors. For example, to see the most popular PDFs go to Quality Assurance > Inventory > Documents > PDF.

Can I view Traffic Analytics data in my CMS Plugin?

Yes, it's possible to show Traffic Analytics data from Siteimprove Analytics and third-party analytics providers in some versions of the Siteimprove CMS Plugin. This is only possible currently for the old plugin experience mentioned here: How to navigate the old CMS Plugin and is not yet available as a feature of the new plugin experience mentioned here: How to navigate the New Siteimprove CMS Plugin, but it might be down the road.

What cookie will be set if I use Traffic Analytic?

The cookie set by Traffic Analytics when you use the Analytics JavaScript code is nmstat.  You can read more about this cookie in the article Siteimprove Analytics cookies.

If you are using the integration with either Google or Adobe Analytics for Traffic Analytics, no additional cookies will be set by Siteimprove.

Are IP addresses of visitors collected when Traffic Analytics is enabled?

No. Sites with Traffic Analytics have IP Anonymization enabled by default so IP addresses are not collected. See IP Anonymization in Siteimprove Analytics to find out more about anonymization.

For Google and Adobe Analytics, it depends on how your configuration is set up on the respective platforms.

Where can I find privacy and security information?

Privacy and Security information related to Siteimprove products and services can be found on the Siteimprove Privacy page.

What data are we pulling via the Traffic Analytics integration?

The data is pulled via the credentials provided, as such we only have access to the data that the credentials give access to.
In any case, we only pull these metrics:

• Page views
• Visits / Sessions
• Entries
• Bounces / Bounce rate
• Time Spent on page

Where does Siteimprove store the data?

Data flows through AWS (Frankfurt).

How long does Siteimprove keep the data?

We overwrite data each day with the last 30 days of data.

Do I need to filter out crawler bot traffic?

A JavaScript crawler can affect your website analytics. Many websites use JavaScript to gather web analytics data. In these cases, a JavaScript crawl by Siteimprove will trigger web analytics leading to page views/impressions.

In order to avoid seeing traffic from the Siteimprove JavaScript crawl in your web analytics solution, you can exclude this traffic from being tracked. For a non-Siteimprove Analytics solution, you can exclude the Siteimprove crawler IP address from your analytics traffic using a filter. Siteimprove automatically excludes our crawler IP addresses from Siteimprove Analytics.