We are ready to expand and partner with be your new partner. Hitsteps have a new set of API functions that allow you to control almost everything which is related to your whitelabel brand and users under your whitelabel.
Our API command set is in PHP but it get input as POST return all data as JSON which make it up for a peaceful integration with almost every programming languages.
Here is list of commands we are currently offering (As of May 2015): Token based authentication, Search Account by Email, ID or Tracking API Key, Get account info, Get API Key from URL, Get list of tracking websites, Get list of accounts, Change email and password of users, Create a new account, Add a new website for tracking, Activate trial, Activate License for a specific duration, Convert licenses, get list of available plans, Get last 7 days pageviews and visits of websites, get auto-authenticated link to all report pages.
We have a full set of plugins we offer for WordPress and Joomla which we can rebrand them at your request. Are you ready? drop us a hint!
Hola! We welcome a new language to join hitsteps list of languages! We officially support spanish language now.
This change has been applied automatically to all of our spanish speaking customers. You can change dashboard language using a dropdown box which we have put at bottom left of our homepage.
We have went ahead and applied multi-language support for our WordPress plugins, yes that is correct! Now you can have our chat widget and statistics widget in spanish language.
These widgets have ability to auto-detect your visitors location and show proper language to them. So chat interface will be in Spanish language for those who are in spanish speaking countries, German to german speaking countries and English to rest of world. or you can manually set language for them in WordPress Admin Dashboard -> Appearance -> Widgets
WordPress analytics is most useful when you can move from a traffic total to the visit behind it. Real-time visitor tracking shows who is on the site now, which page they entered, what they viewed next, where they came from, and whether they have visited before.
This guide explains how to install the Hitsteps WordPress plugin, connect your site, verify that tracking works, and solve the issues that most often prevent analytics from appearing.
What real-time visitor tracking adds to WordPress
A standard pageview chart helps with trends. A live visitor timeline helps with questions that are happening now:
Which page is a current visitor reading?
Did a campaign visitor continue to a product, pricing, or contact page?
Where did a form lead or WooCommerce shopper enter the site?
Is a repeat visitor returning to the same service or product?
Did a redesign, cache change, or consent banner stop tracking?
Hitsteps combines the live feed with referrers, campaign data, devices, approximate locations, page paths, returning visitor profiles, click heatmaps, goals, labels, triggers, and live chat context. See the complete real-time visitor tracking overview before installation if you want to understand the resulting dashboard first.
Before installing the WordPress analytics plugin
You need:
Administrator access to a self-hosted WordPress website
A Hitsteps account and website profile
The Hitsteps API key assigned to that website
Permission to configure analytics and consent for the site
Sign in to Hitsteps, add the WordPress site if it is not already present, and copy the API key for that exact website. The API key identifies the destination account and site; it is different from a full manual tracking-code snippet.
2. Install the plugin from WordPress
Open Plugins → Add New Plugin in WordPress administration.
Search for Hitsteps.
Install the Hitsteps visitor analytics plugin.
Activate it for the current site.
If your hosting workflow requires a ZIP upload, use the download provided on the WordPress setup page, then upload it through the Add Plugin screen.
3. Paste the API key and save
Open the Hitsteps plugin settings, paste the API key without spaces, and save. The plugin adds the official Hitsteps tracking script to public WordPress pages.
4. Clear every relevant cache
Clear the WordPress page cache, optimization-plugin cache, host cache, and CDN cache after installation. A cached HTML page created before activation may not contain the new tracking tag yet.
5. Verify your own visit in real time
Open the public website in a private window or another browser.
Visit two or three pages.
Open the Hitsteps live dashboard.
Confirm that the visit appears and the page changes are recorded.
Do not stop after seeing the plugin marked “Active.” The live test proves that the public page contains the tag, the browser can load it, and the collection endpoint is receiving data.
After installation, verify a real public visit and its page path in the Hitsteps live dashboard.
Common WordPress tracking problems
The plugin is active, but no visitors appear
View the source of a public page and search for “Hitsteps” or “edgecdnplus.” If the script is missing, clear caches and confirm the plugin is active for the correct WordPress site. If it is present, check the browser console and network panel for Content Security Policy errors, blocked requests, or JavaScript failures.
The same visit appears twice
Look for duplicate installation. Hitsteps may have been added through the plugin and also through Google Tag Manager, a theme footer, a header/footer injection plugin, or a previous manual snippet. Keep one intended installation path per page.
Only some pages are tracked
Compare a working page with a missing page. Landing-page builders, checkout templates, membership areas, cached mobile variants, and external subdomains can use different layouts. Confirm the tracking script is present on every public template that should be measured.
Tracking stopped after enabling a consent banner
Review the consent tool’s category and script-blocking configuration. The website should respect the visitor’s privacy choice while consistently applying your intended analytics behavior after consent is granted or denied.
A CDN or security plugin blocks the script
Check JavaScript delay settings, script-combination rules, Content Security Policy headers, firewall logs, and CDN transformations. Exclude the Hitsteps loader from an optimizer only when testing proves that the optimization changes or blocks it.
Use real-time analytics for WordPress content and leads
Once tracking is verified, create a small workflow instead of watching the live feed without a purpose.
Click heatmaps help answer a different question from the visitor feed: which page elements attract interaction? Use them on important landing pages, pricing pages, product pages, and long articles to find ignored calls to action, misleading visual cues, and navigation choices.
A heatmap is more useful when you also inspect the traffic source, device, page path, and outcome behind the clicks. The website heatmap guide explains a practical review process and the product scope.
WordPress analytics privacy checklist
Describe analytics collection in the website privacy notice.
Configure consent behavior for the countries and visitors you serve.
Collect identifiable fields only with a valid legal basis.
Restrict dashboard access to team members who need it.
Exclude staff or test traffic when it would distort business reports.
Review retention and account settings before tracking sensitive workflows.
An anonymous visit does not automatically reveal a real person. Visitor profiles can preserve browser-level history, while known account or customer context should be attached only through an intentional and permitted integration.
WordPress real-time visitor tracking checklist
Create the correct Hitsteps site profile.
Install and activate the official WordPress plugin.
Paste the matching API key.
Clear WordPress, host, and CDN caches.
Verify one public visit and multiple pageviews.
Check for duplicate manual or tag-manager installations.
Test accepted and denied consent states.
Choose the pages, campaigns, goals, heatmaps, and alerts your team will actually review.
Ready to begin? Follow the focused Hitsteps WordPress plugin setup guide, then verify your visit in the live dashboard before treating installation as complete.
Advertisement in popular networks such as Facebook Ads, Bing Ads as well as our beloved Google Adwords isn’t cheap! So you are spending a lot of money on advertisement with different keywords or in different networks, How do you manage and optimize the outcome?
We have provided campaign tracking, which allow you to know which of your keywords are getting best outcome among different ad networks. You can use this campaign tracking for everything else, but now we are going to have a look at it from Advertisement point of view.
Fortunately, All ad networks have a decent campaign Conversion tracking built-in. However, I can be very time consuming to open them all separately and have a look at figures and trying to find out what is actually going on! Some ad networks don’t even have Conversion tracking.
In Hitsteps, You can define your desired Goals pages. Set a default goal value (or you can modify goal value in real-time using javascript) and then connect that Goal to a Campaign landing page, It is that simple!
Once you have configured it, you can monitor all of your campaigns in real time.
It doesn’t end there, you can see list of visitors who just landed on your campaign, but never made it to goal page. You can also see list of visitors who successfully made it to goal page.
It allows you to see list of your campaigns returns on investments (ROI) all in one page.
Google Adwords and most other ads networks, doesn’t provide it real-time, but we do it in real-time. It can be very addictive, we have warned you!
Old days, web analytics were very simple. If they show your daily pageviews and number of visitors, you would be satisfied. But nowadays, those are called web statistics. so what is web analytics actually? Web analytics process your visitors information and give you more detailed information from exact same data. We now calculate bounce rate, we track clicks to generate heat maps, we track every single page views to make a detailed visitor browsing history in your website and keep them all in visitor’s profile.
Each web analytics service, have a certain major features point, what if you need something that is not there?
It is why we have introduced “Labels”, You can access labels in your dashboard menu, but lets have a look at what is that exactly?
Labels basic function is to add a customized colored label for each profile. so, to make it searchable, and to make it easy to understand. but in same time, it also analyze each labels separately.
As a result, for example, you can have hitsteps track everyone who visit your product checkout page, add a label to visitor profile with your defined name or color, and generate graphs for that label and notify you when this label is triggered via Email, Google Hangout and Desktop Notification.
There are many filters that we cover for labels. You can trigger it based on following values: IP Address, Visitor name, keyword searched, first referer, referer, first URL visited, URL visited, Page title visited, Browser, OS, Country, Region, City, Tag, Screen Width, Screen Height, Language, Java and Flash. These values can be mixed together!
So, you can define it in a way if a visitor from USA, who his first referer was from google adsense visit checkout page from product listing page, trigger the label and notify you. You will have the graph driven for it, and you get notification, with with help of our live visitor chat feature, you might make use of this trigger and contact your customer and seal the deal!
There are thousands of plugins to install for WordPress platform, making it a hard decision to decide which plugin is really a must-have. We have analyzed and ran a survey on our customers and publishing list of plugins that every website running WordPress must have.
Since our base of survey was our own users, so obviously they all mentioned they cannot run a website without Hitsteps, we second that! It pack most important web analytics features in a simple and unified user interface, allowing you to see list of online visitors, click on them and see pages they see in your website, see click heatmaps and even start a chat with your visitors.
WordPress out of the box is already quite a good platform for SEO but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! Improve your WordPress SEO, Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin.
Visual Composer is Commercial Drag and Drop Frontend and Backend Page Builder Plugin for WordPress. You will be able to take full control over your WordPress site, build any layout you can imagine – no programming knowledge required. Moreover, now you can choose either work on a backend or move your page building process to frontend and instantly see changes you make.
Traditionally known as the “sharing tool”, AddThis has taken website tools to the next level through the creation of recommended content and conversion tools while also streamlining and evolving their suite of social tools, including sharing and following buttons. AddThis provides the best sharing, social, recommended content, and conversion tools to help you make your website smarter.
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.
WordPress Backup to Dropbox has been created to give you peace of mind that your blog is backed up on a regular basis. Just choose a day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed and kick back and wait for your websites files and a SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox! Keep your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes with this sleek, easy to use plugin.
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. It is not just another contact form plugin!
Wordfence starts by checking if your site is already infected. Wordfence do a deep server-side scan of your source code comparing it to the Official WordPress repository for core, themes and plugins. Then Wordfence secures your site and makes it up to 50 times faster.
This plugin will let you add, remove and arrange the buttons that are shown on the Visual Editor toolbar. It includes 15 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen. .
We all do campaigns from time to time, some might be successful and some might feel like waste of resources. Question is, how to get most out of every campaign we run?
To answer this question, we need to study our current customer base. What make them use our service/product? More importantly, what problem are we solving?
It must be main focus, if you have no idea what your customers are looking for, then stop right now and use services like SurveyMonkey to ask this question from your customers. Make them engage with your survey by offering something of value once they fill up the survey form.
Once you know your customer base, now it’s time to analyze your campaign source. Is your campaign targeting your existing customers? Then you already know what they are looking for. Go ahead and get most of your result by offering them a new feature, discount or something they all are looking for.
Are you targeting new customers? Then you must go back and see what problem are you solving for your current loyal customers. New customers will most likely have those problems and you’ll be able to help them. Put focus on what you can solve for them.
Make it look big result yet easy to achieve. Make them want to try your product and see if it work for them.
Now, where to run this campaign? If you are targeting your current visitors, then of course, you can run campaign in a frame in your website or use services such as MailChimp to blast email to them (make sure they agree to receive promotional emails, nobody likes spam)
If you are going to tagger target new customers, where is better than Facebook ads?
You might say Google AdWords, but that depends on your competitor. Try your keywords in Google AdWords and see how much is price of your keywords to be appear in homepage.
If that’s very expensive, just forget about Google AdWords. Competition is very high and you’ll lose more than you earn. You might try Microsoft ads system as an alternative where there are less competitors and take it as your advantage.
But Facebook ensure that your ads will be seen, commented or shared among users, thus you’ll get more exposure. Make sure your target correct audience. Try to guess which interests are more likely to attracts your specified audience. Try to narrow down your audience, so that you get more quality exposure. You don’t want people who like vintage gadgets to see your high end product ads!
Try to run few ads and see which text attract more customers.
You’ll need a SEO optimized landing page to bring those users in. It must be as attractive as your homepage, and it must have very clear call to action button. Make sure keywords the is main problem for your users which you are solving, are bold and repeated over.
These way you get some chance to earn organic free clicks from Google and beat all those competitors who are paying expensive funds for their ads.
Lastly, you’ll need to track this incoming and existing visitors. You never can guess why your visitors are not converting unless you track their behavior and see in which step, visitors are dropping. Hitsteps offer real-time web analytics dashboard so that you can watch them as they switch pages, as well as campaign tracking so the you can see how many entered your landing page and went as far as registration page, as far as add to cart page and so on. Just sign up for your free account and put tracking code in each of your pages.
Now you are fully equipped for a campaign success. Run your ads, monitor your audience and pages where visitors are dropping, optimize those weak area, keep changing your ads until you get best outcome and lastly, don’t forget about interacting with comments people leave in your Facebook ads and posts.
It was not long ago when all of us web developers were screaming and pulling out our hairs over Internet Explorer!
Those days are gone! According to latest updates, Internet Explorer share on browser usage is falling more and more each month. It’s only Advantage is being built in into Windows computers. New version of Internet Explorer 10, is not a bad browser at all, but it’s name still remind us of those sleepless nights trying to fix that small yet big problem in Internet Explorer. We hope that Microsoft’s new browser, Spartan Browser, can come into market as a brand new and bugless browser.
According to Hitsteps Analytics, Google chrome is now leader in Browsers war owning more than half of the market. Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer have an equal usage rate which is slightly less than Google Chrome. Google Chrome being fast and updated regularly with latest HTML5 and CSS3 technologies, make it popular among users and developers. We hope Spartan browser don’t fall short in this war.
It is very sad to see Opera browser still couldn’t gain any popularity. Recently, Opera ditched it’s own Presto engine in favor of Webkit (used by Google Chrome and Safari) to be able concentrate more on GUI and other aspects of browsers, however, this decision didn’t improve any of it’s ranks in browsers war.
Hitsteps analytics monitor type of devices such as Desktop, Tablet and Mobile phone, therefor we can give following statistics about users device. as you can see, Desktop have biggest rate among our users.
Will Google Chrome stay leader in browsers war? It’s likely to stay leader and we hope so.
Open two analytics dashboards for the same website and you will rarely see identical visitor, session, or pageview totals. That does not automatically mean one tool is broken. In most cases, the tools are measuring different events, applying different rules, or receiving different portions of the traffic.
The useful question is not “Which dashboard has the biggest number?” It is “What does each number include, exclude, and call a visitor?” Once you compare those definitions, most discrepancies become explainable.
The short answer: analytics tools do not observe the same reality
A browser analytics tag records activity only when its code loads and is permitted to send data. A server log records requests that reach the server, including many bots and asset requests. A commerce platform may count activity through first-party store events. A privacy-focused configuration may intentionally collect less data than another setup.
Even two browser-based analytics tools can disagree because they use different session timeouts, bot filters, consent behavior, identity rules, time zones, attribution logic, and processing windows.
Measurement source
What it usually sees
Why its total can differ
Browser analytics
Pageviews and events sent after JavaScript loads
Consent, blockers, script errors, navigation timing, and tag configuration
Server logs
Requests reaching the web server
Bots, monitoring services, cached pages, assets, retries, and prefetching
Commerce or CMS analytics
First-party platform sessions, orders, and customer events
Platform-specific definitions, bot filtering, consent rules, and time windows
Advertising platforms
Ad clicks and attributed conversions
Attribution windows, cross-device modeling, duplicate clicks, and consent
1. Consent and tracking prevention remove different visits
If a visitor declines analytics consent, a correctly configured analytics tag may not store or send the same data it would after consent. Browser privacy controls, content blockers, DNS filters, corporate networks, and security extensions can also prevent one vendor’s script while allowing another.
This creates a normal pattern: the website server still receives the page request, but one or more analytics dashboards never receive the corresponding browser event. Google’s own consent documentation notes that denied analytics consent can stop its tag from tracking that activity.
Do not “fix” this difference by bypassing a visitor’s choice. Instead, document how each tool behaves before and after consent and compare like with like.
2. The tracking code may load too late—or more than once
A visitor can leave before a delayed analytics script finishes loading. A strict Content Security Policy can block the script or its collection endpoint. A JavaScript error can stop later code. Single-page applications may change routes without producing a traditional full-page load unless virtual pageviews are configured.
The opposite problem also happens: the same analytics tag is installed through both a plugin and a tag manager, causing duplicate pageviews or events. This is common after a redesign, CMS migration, or plugin change.
3. “User,” “visitor,” “session,” and “pageview” are not interchangeable
A person can create multiple sessions. Multiple people can use one browser. One person can use several devices. A browser can delete or restrict the identifier that previously connected visits. Logged-in identity can sometimes join activity that browser-only tracking would keep separate.
Session rules differ as well. Google Analytics, for example, documents a default session timeout after 30 minutes of inactivity. Another service can use a different inactivity window or a different rule for when a visit starts and ends.
Before comparing totals, make sure both reports use the same metric:
Pageviews: how many tracked page displays or virtual page events occurred.
Sessions or visits: groups of activity separated by a timeout or another session boundary.
Users or visitors: identifiers believed to represent distinct browsers, devices, accounts, or people.
Active or engaged users: visitors who meet a product-specific activity threshold.
4. Bots, monitoring, previews, and internal traffic change the baseline
Search crawlers, uptime monitors, link preview services, security scanners, performance tests, feed readers, and malicious bots all request pages. Server logs usually see them. Analytics products may filter some, classify some, or count some as ordinary visits.
No bot filter is perfect. New automation appears constantly, and legitimate browsers can resemble bots when privacy tools remove identifying signals. Internal staff, developers, QA services, and agency previews can also inflate traffic unless they are filtered consistently.
When a discrepancy begins suddenly, compare user agents, locations, landing pages, referrers, engagement, and request frequency. The existing guide to analytics bot and spam filtering explains the problem in more detail.
5. Time zones and date boundaries split the same visit differently
A report using UTC will not match a report using the store, server, or account time zone around midnight. “Today” can represent different hours in each system. Daylight-saving changes, recently edited account settings, and delayed processing create additional differences.
For a fair comparison, use the same start and end timestamps—not only the same date label—and avoid the newest hours if one platform is still processing them.
6. Attribution rules change where the visit is credited
The total number of visits may be close while channel totals disagree. One tool might preserve the previous campaign, another might credit the most recent referrer, and a commerce platform might use its own attribution window for an order.
Redirects, payment gateways, cross-domain checkout, missing UTM parameters, stripped referrers, and privacy restrictions can all turn a known source into “direct,” “unassigned,” or another channel. Compare the visitor’s landing URL and raw campaign parameters before comparing grouped channel names.
7. Processing, thresholds, modeling, and sampling alter reports
Some reports update immediately; others are recalculated or completed later. Google documents expected differences between reporting surfaces because of filters, retention, thresholds, behavioral modeling, and processing time. It also documents sampling in some high-volume queries.
A live visitor feed and a finalized acquisition report therefore answer different questions. Use real-time visitor tracking to investigate current activity, then use finalized historical reports for longer-term trends.
Live visitor activity and aggregated reports should be compared according to their measurement rules, not expected to be identical.
How to compare two analytics tools correctly
Choose one small time window. Start with a quiet hour or a single day that has finished processing.
Match the time zone. Convert both reports to the same actual start and end timestamps.
Compare the same metric. Pageviews with pageviews, sessions with sessions, and users with users.
Check consent behavior. Test accepted, denied, and unset consent states where applicable.
Verify tag placement. Confirm one copy of each intended tag loads on every relevant page and route.
Separate humans from automation. Review bots, monitors, previews, staff traffic, and performance tests.
Inspect raw journeys. Compare a few individual visits, landing pages, sources, and events before judging the totals.
Wait for final processing. Recheck recent data after the documented processing window.
Which analytics number is correct?
There is rarely one universal number independent of definitions. The most useful number is the one produced consistently for the decision you are making.
Use commerce records for completed orders, server monitoring for server availability, advertising reports for platform attribution, and visitor-level analytics for understanding the page-by-page journey. If you need aggregate acquisition reporting and individual live visitor context, use the tools together and define the role of each.
Big news, We are excited to announce Hitsteps is available for free now!
Your account is eligible to use free license if your website don’t have much of page views.
1,000 page views per month allowance is good for blogger, photographers and newly developed websites.
What are you waiting for? Get your free plugin at http://wordpress.org/plugins/hitsteps-visitor-manager/ for WordPress or http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension/site-management/analytics/hitsteps-visitor-manager for Joomla
