Siteimprove Traffic Analytics FAQ

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What is Siteimprove Traffic?
• How do I enable Traffic on my account?
• What features are included in Traffic?
• Can I view Traffic data in my CMS Plugin?
• What cookies will be set if I use Traffic?
• Are IP addresses of visitors collected when Traffic is enabled?
• Where can I find privacy and security information?
• What data are we pulling via the Traffic 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?

Traffic 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 on my account?

There are a few ways to enable Traffic. 

• 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 Manager or submit a request if you need help in enabling Traffic.  

What features are included in Traffic?

Traffic 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 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 Main menu > Accessibility > Pages. Here you can sort the table by page views. More examples are listed in the paragraph below.

Examples of where traffic data can help you manage tasks

Quality Assurance

• QA > Summary > Traffic Pages
• QA > Links > Pages with broken links
• QA > Inventory > Pages

Accessibility

• Accessibility > Pages
• Accessibility > Issues  > Specific issue
• Accessibility > Validation  > HTML Validations

SEO

• SEO > Optimize > Issues and Recommendation
• SEO > Optimize > Target pages (SEO Advanced)
• SEO > Research > Keyword monitoring (SEO Advanced)

Policy

• Policy > My policies > Misspellings
• Policy > My policies > pages containing “x”
• Policy > My policies > documents over than 3 year

Data Privacy 

• Data Privacy > Personal data > Personal data types > names
• Data Privacy > Personal Data > Pages and files containing personal data
• Data Privacy Personal data > Personal data types > email addresses

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

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

Traffic 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: This is not applicable for GA and AA

Traffic 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 data in my CMS Plugin?

Yes, it's possible to show Traffic data from Siteimprove Analytics and third-party analytics providers in the Siteimprove CMS Plugin. To learn more on this see the article "How to navigate the Siteimprove CMS Plugin".

What cookie will be set if I use Traffic?

The cookie set by Traffic 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 GA or AA for Traffic, no additional cookies will be set by Siteimprove.

Are IP addresses of visitors collected when Traffic is enabled?

No. Sites with Traffic 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 GA and AA, 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 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.