[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've Reached episode number 426, entitled Why Independent Analytics could be the WordPress alternative to Google Analytics that you've been waiting for. It was published on Thursday, the 26th of June, 2025.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and a few bits and pieces just before we begin the main content with two founders of this fabulous plugin.
The first thing to mention is that if you are a WP Builds listener, the plugin authors, Independent Analytics, the pro version has got a 10% discount. So whilst you're listening to this podcast and weighing up whether you think it's for you, bear in mind that 10% off is going to be available for people that use the coupon code, WPBUILDS. Once more, the coupon code will be WPBUILDS. No spaces, and that will get you 10% off your Independent Analytics pro account.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, honestly, this is something that I really do like. When a plugin comes along, and I find it to be really credible, I like to shout it from the rooftops, and this really is that. It's called Independent Analytics, and it may be something which has gone under your radar, but it's a WordPress alternative to Google Analytics.
Everything is contained in your WordPress database. It's not phoning home. All of the data is shown in your dashboard, and boy does it gather a lot of data. It's gonna be incredibly useful for client websites, your own website, and obviously that whole GDPR compliance, privacy regulation thing is pretty much taken care of.
Find out today from the founders, Ben and Andrew, what the plugin does, why they built it, how it works, what it doesn't do, and I really hope that you enjoy this episode. Don't forget that listeners to this podcast can get 10% off Independent Analytics Pro by using the coupon code WPBUILDS, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast today by two guests. I'm joined by Ben Sibley and Andrew Mead. Hello, both I.
[00:05:16] Andrew Mead: Hey, how's it going?
[00:05:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good. Thank you. so this is new to me and I am going to act as the protagonist, the dom protagonist as these two fine gentlemen explain the product that they've got.
So it's a plugin, it's an analytics plugin, and I'm hopeful that if you are GDPR minded. There's quite a lot in here to unpack. Maybe by the end of this I'll have taken your cold dead hands off Google Analytics, and, finally you'll be using something a little bit more WordPress orientated, shall we say.
Just before we begin, let's go around the houses, just a tiny little bio. Tell us who you are. So let's start with Ben.
[00:05:54] Benjamin Sibley: So my name is Ben Sibley. I've been working with WordPress since about 2010. In 2014, I launched a WordPress theme shop called Compete Themes, and then in 2022, I launched independent analytics with Andrew.
[00:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Thank you so much, Andrew.
[00:06:12] Andrew Mead: Hey, I'm Andrew. I am also in Philadelphia. I don't know if Ben mentioned he is, but I am also, and, I have been working with WordPress just since the launch of this product. So 2022 I had done, I. A few very small things, a decade before that, but nothing serious. And then there was a massive gap in there, but I came back for what I thought was a really interesting idea, and it turns out that we were right about that.
So it was worth, it was worth return.
[00:06:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Thank you both so much. So let's get the URL out of the way because that's where we really want to be pointing you. pause this podcast, go to independent wp.com. Once more, independent wp.com. Go over there. And, check it out. You'll basically immediately get the point. It's an analytic solution.
I guess it stands in opposition to things like Google Analytics and what have you. the UVP at the top is analytics can be so much better. Try the free independent analytics WordPress plugin and ditch the legacy analytics. So give us the pitch, either one of you, what separates this from what is already a fairly robust free solution in Google Analytics.
Why would we want to jump ship.
[00:07:24] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, so there's a couple of reasons. for starters, Google Analytics four has become very complicated to use. It's a lot more enterprise leaning these days. Even though it's free independent analytics, it adds a dashboard right into your WordPress admin. It's way easier to add. You just install it.
There's no other configuration required, and it also complies with the GDPR, so you don't have to worry about violating your visitor's privacy, cookie banners, anything like that. You just install it and the analytics are very easy to read.
[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Okay.
[00:07:58] Andrew Mead: Yeah, and we did it like the WordPress way too. And that's the whole point of the product is that your data lives on your WordPress install. We don't have servers, so we can't look at your data. They don't exist. So it just lives on your site. You can do whatever you want with it and yeah, it's really
[00:08:14] Nathan Wrigley: So just to clarify that point, let's hammer that bit home. We install the plugin. Every single bit of data is held within our own database. There's no phone in home. There's no kind of
[00:08:24] Andrew Mead: There is no home to
phone
[00:08:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Perfect. So everything is right there. Yeah.
[00:08:29] Andrew Mead: yeah, literally the only thing we do is we grab a large file from. Our server to download and it's just for, it's related to geolocation stuff, but it's just a little data set. And that's only because the plugin size can only be so big. But there is no, there is no server to phone, home to all your views, all your visitors, all their data.
It's in your WordPress database.
[00:08:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's great. Okay. that is like reason number one then, isn't it? Because the WordPress community I think will really value that. I think there's a lot of, I don't know, I think 15 years ago I had all the faith in Google. I just thought that it was the best company on the planet and that.
Kind of trust has been slowly eroded. And now I'm really reluctant to, to put anything Google related because I just see it as this, I see myself as the product, basically. And so any initiative like this on the WordPress side of things, which enables me to own that data and not be giving it to somebody who will then no doubt be selling it, for their own benefit is really good.
Okay. The other problem that I've always had with Google Analytics, even prior to V four, so v anything basically. Is that it was massively over complicated. By that, I mean there were menus within menus. Within menus. It was almost like you could take a college degree on how the heck to interpret it and understand it.
All I wanted to know was this basic set of things like where are my visitors coming from? How many visitors do I have? Which pages did they go to? And then this whole raft of word pressy things, which I could never quite wrangle, like which authors? Are popular and does anybody care about the fact that I categorize things and I'm looking at your website and thinking that's where you specialize.
You lean into the WordPress stuff and hopefully you are doing it in a way which is easy to surface, not this menus, within menus things. So there's not a question there, but just comment on that,
[00:10:24] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, totally. So we, a big part of the plugin is that it's deeply integrated with WordPress and it's greatly simplified. I actually have taken, Google Analytics training courses in the past. And I still had trouble getting around it and understanding it. So I've spent hours learning this tool. So you don't have to do that for independent analytics.
because it has this integration with WordPress, there's a lot of data, like you said, you wanna see the authors of your posts, you wanna see the categories, the page type, things like that. They're all included automatically. So one of the reports that we have is called the pages report. And in Google Analytics or some other software, it's looking at your site from the outside, right?
So the tracking script is on the front end. They only have front end data. Independent analytics is a WordPress plugin, so it runs inside of your site, so it has, it knows everything about your site. That means that when you go to the pages report, instead of seeing a list of URLs, you're gonna see the page
[00:11:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Yeah.
[00:11:30] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, one column is the URL, another column is the page type. So you can see, oh, that's a post, that's a page, that's a podcast episode. you can see the categories, the authors, and then a central part of the product is that we also have this filtering system. So you could add a filter to say, let me see stats for only my blog posts, and then it'll filter, and you'll see only your blog posts, only your podcast episodes, only your category archives and things like that.
[00:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm guessing not only will it be able to be done, the way that you described it, it felt almost like it was drilling down into a spreadsheet. I'm guessing that you you do the typical arrangement of charts and things like that. So I can see it in a sort of visual way, line charts and bar charts and things like that.
[00:12:15] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, it's basically broken into three components. So at the top you have what we call the quick stats. That just gives you the number of visitors views bounced right over the current, Tate range. You have selected. Then there's a chart, which also has metrics you can configure. And then below that is the table and the table's gonna list all of your pages on the refers report.
That's gonna list all of the different sites that sent you visitors, and the same thing for the geographic, campaigns and devices reports. So those three main elements really let you get a good look at what's going on your website.
[00:12:53] Andrew Mead: And I feel like once that clicks, it can be pretty exciting of being like, all right, I wanna look at an author and I wanna look at their posts by publish date, or I wanna look at their posts by bounce rate, or I wanna look at their posts by WooCommerce conversions or form submissions. So once you're integrated with all of the.
WordPress stuff in that ecosystem. Like before the call, we were talking about WS forms, like you can track those form submissions that's now in your data and you can use that as you're digging around. which is cool because there's nothing for you to do. You just apply the right filters and the data's there.
There's nothing to set
[00:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So there's like a whole third party ecosystem. You mentioned Ws form there. Perhaps you've got a specific integration with 'em. Maybe we'll come to that in the end. Not that one in particular, but like the third party bit, because the WordPress ecosystem is really, there's a few. Big players, things like form plugins and SEO plugins that it might be interesting to see if you've got any bindings for those.
But just to go back, it feels and I could be getting this wrong, it feels like your analytics kind of groups itself into four or maybe five main areas. You've got pages, but I guess for pages, read posts, custom post types, whatever, all of that comes onto that. Then you've got referrers. So the source of where is the traffic coming from?
what's changing over time from where it's coming from. Geo geography speaks for itself. Where in the world are people coming from? And, devices. I think that was the ones that I remembered. Maybe there's more than that, but that's pretty straightforward. there's nothing particularly complicated in there.
So we log into our WordPress dashboard. We find the analytics, menu item, we click in there and then we just drill down in a sidebar to see the spread of data. That's how it works, right?
[00:14:38] Benjamin Sibley: essentially the only difference is that. In the sidebar, what we've put in, there are a few like sample reports for you to check out, but you can save, you can customize a report and then save it and name it, and then have it there in the sidebar. So the sidebar is completely customizable. You can build a suite of all the different reports you want.
but it, yeah, it is primarily broken down into the four different reports that you identified, which just makes it easy to find you, my traffic sources, my devices, and so on.
[00:15:08] Nathan Wrigley: I guess one of the questions that I know is gonna get asked of me if I don't ask it of you is, how heavy is this? 'cause obviously you're adding a layer of inspection that's, you're obviously injecting code somewhere on every page load so that this can happen. I'm guessing the fact that you're not importing a library is a.
Good thing. there's no snippet of JavaScript, which has gotta be downloaded in the example of Google Analytics from their server. How lightweight is it basically is what I'm asking.
[00:15:37] Andrew Mead: Yeah, so in essence, it is what you're expecting. There's gonna be a little tracking script that has to run on your site. there's no way around that. And then, when it comes to actually recording that data, just a little bit of data is inserted for that view. I think you're gonna find that most of the heavy lifting happens when you're digging into some obscure analytics as the analytics viewer.
So that's happening, on your backend when you're trying to. Gain some insight, but for actually tracking the view, it's pretty lightweight. We're inserting a couple of database records. We're not running, we're not crunching any numbers at that point. We're basically saying, Hey, this thing happened, like this form submission happened, and that's a pretty fast process to insert one or two rows into a couple of SQL tables.
[00:16:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:16:19] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, and I think it's important to note that I, there's some people have come to us with this misconception that. if you have a larger database, your website's gonna load slower. But it's only the data that you query that matters. So when someone visits your website, independent analytics is not gonna have any impact on how fast your site loads because that script we add, it makes rest API request.
And it's deferred. Yeah, it's deferred. So it waits until the site's fully loaded. Which means it doesn't affect, it doesn't affect your web core vitals that Google uses, and it's imperceivable to the visitor. So in terms of performance. The only way, the only area you see any performance impact is in the analytics menu itself.
And so for a site that gets, let's say, 5,000 visitors a month, which is like most websites, but if it gets 50,000, even a hundred thousand, that's gonna load perfectly fine. You're not gonna see the analytics dashboard loans loading slowly unless you have a million visitors a month. And then it's then it depends on what sort of database resources you have available, but there's not gonna be a performance impact on the front end, even if you have.
2 million visitors a month.
[00:17:29] Nathan Wrigley: Do you crunch the numbers? So you're gathering the numbers in real time, obviously in, in putting those into the database, rest API calls and so on. Do you crunch the numbers at a different moment or is it, so for example, do the numbers get crunched when I view the dashboard or does it happen on some sort of chron run like twice, three times a day or whatever, so that's ready and visible to me.
I'm just curious about when all of those numbers get pushed into the graphs and
[00:17:54] Andrew Mead: For sure. Yeah. So they, live in your database in a, very raw form and it's all there. If you were curious, you could download WP admin or you could check it out. You could create your own queries, but all the heavy crunching happens as you request that data. 'cause there's so many variations.
Maybe I was looking at this month, now I'm looking at last week. It's That's a whole different set of data to crunch, or you wanna see, maybe a specific filter gets applied or you're only looking at certain subset of the data that's more data to crunch, so you can't compute all the combinations realistically.
So we've just done a ton of work on the SQL query side with indexes to just really streamline and speed that up as much as possible. And like Ben said, like at a certain point. I think $5 hosting is gonna struggle if you're getting 10 million views, a month. and we get some people on some very interesting hosts doing very interesting things.
We've played with a lot of, wild West websites, but for the most part, yeah, you just gotta scale that server up a little bit as you grow and you're gonna be just fine.
[00:18:59] Nathan Wrigley: I, can I ask this sort of GDPR question because I think Google Analytics four was a response to GDPR and various other legislations that I think primarily begin in the eu. And I'm wondering how much of that you completely got sidestep because you are storing it in the websites.
Database. In other words, there's no phoning home or any of this. But also I wonder if you assist your customers in creating things like privacy policies and things like that. do you make it, do you make it fairly straightforward for somebody like me who would install your plugin to add something to my privacy policy?
So let's start with the GDPR question. Did you just completely sidestep that by putting things inside the, the website database, or were there still concerns that you had to adhere to?
[00:19:46] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, so there's basically three things we do to, be comply with the GDPR. The first thing is that we don't use cookies at all, which means you don't have to show a cookie banner for independent analytics. The second thing is that we don't, yeah, we don't communicate with any external servers.
Which, skips a whole lot of complications. that's the hard stuff. So the data is both created and stored entirely on your server. And then the last element is that we don't store any personally identifiable information. So when someone arrives on the website, we get their IP address. We use that to find their approximate geolocation, and we save that geolocation to the database.
Then we hash the IP address with their user agent, string and assault token. That creates a unique ID that, it's important to note this isn't encryption. there's no password or key to reverse it. It's a one-way hash. So this is something you're not gonna crack before the sun burns out or you get some sort of quantum computer.
So it's really
[00:20:49] Andrew Mead: it, let us know because every single company needs to know as well because this is like what the Internet's built on is
[00:20:54] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah. So that IP address, it's only considered personal identifiable information, at least as I understand it, because it could be given to an ISP and then they could find out who you are. It's not something that necessarily concerns small businesses anyway. It's more of a thing they're worried about with corporations like Google, but it regardless, you don't wanna store raw IP addresses, and so we thoroughly hash it and store that unique ID instead.
[00:21:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the title that you've gone for your plugin, independent analytics. It it feels like you're leaning into that a little bit. this idea that we're not some sort of big company. We are, obviously independent and I don't know, independent seems to have that kind of, that feel to it.
we're not doing the wrong thing, we're not storing the data, we're gonna anonymize the IP addresses, those kind of things. So that's why I asked that question really.
[00:21:45] Andrew Mead: I also think it would've been pretty hard to launch a new analytics, tool in 2022 and not read the room on that stuff. Like GDPR is essential. Having the data on your site's essential, there was a lot of just things that me and Ben never talked about because there was just no debate on the other end.
Like it had to be on your site, it had to be all of these things. So a lot of that was just decisions made for us by the general. Vibe around analytics at the
[00:22:12] Nathan Wrigley: Do you do anything outside of WordPress, or is this strictly a WordPress solution?
[00:22:18] Andrew Mead: just WordPress. it's completely built in. There is, to create it for a different CMS would require recreating it entirely, right? It's just 100% integrated with WordPress and it only word with WordPress.
[00:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: That, yeah, that's really interesting. I can't think of any kind of rival that you might have. Okay. Let's get back to the sort of more general thing. So if I'm a user, I've installed the plugin, we can talk about pricing for the pro version, but I know there's a generous, free version and so on. We'll get to that.
installed the plugin and. What's my next step really? Am I setting up reports? Is it a kind of case of, okay, log in, there are some default reports, which will run for you automatically, but then I can go in and tweak them. I've got a, I don't know, I've got a back office of a hundred editors that I need to assign and figure out who's creating the articles, which are popular and then.
I guess, how do I get notified when there's new intel? Do you do a job of that? Do you email us when interesting things are happening, maybe on a weekly basis or something like that? So what are we doing? What are the actual steps that I would take as a newbie to your plugin?
[00:23:21] Benjamin Sibley: So when you first install it, we do have a getting started video tutorial. I would recommend. Checking that out right away. But, the only thing you really need to do is if you're using a caching plugin, which most sites do clear the cache. That way the tracking script shows up on every page of the site.
After that, if your site is pretty popular, if you refresh the page, you'll see visitors, they come in as they happen. So there's, for a lot of sites, there's no other configuration required. You just install it and you clear your cache. if you have a more robust website. maybe let's say you have an e-commerce store with, other people accessing the site, you would want to enable the option to track logged in visitors.
So that's something cool that we do. We don't, if you're logged in, your activity gets ignored, which is really nice. If you just have your own blog, you don't wanna mess up your own stats. if you have people logging into your site, you check one box. Now people who are logged in are blocked, and then we have the ability to block, visitors based on their user role.
So by default, even if you enable tracking visitors, administrators, they're still ignored. Then you could say, let me ignore also my, my contributors my. store managers and then there's an option to give other people access. So only admins can see the analytics by default. But if you have a store manager, an editor that you want to see the analytics, you can easily give them access.
You can even give contributors access and authors access to only see posts they've written if you have a lot of publishers on your website.
[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: just to clarify, so you can set up all these different reports, but you can also be fairly granular on the backend to, you can assign different user roles if you like, to different kinds of reports. So person X over there can only receive or c intel about their own posts.
And this person can only see information about all of their posts. But the SEO person in our building, they can see everything. So you can be granular in that way.
[00:25:24] Benjamin Sibley: not exactly. You can't control, you can't control the exact report that each, user role can see, but you can decide which user roles can see the analytics and which ones can't. And then there's one other option where you can let people only see reports and, not, I shouldn't say reports, they can only see traffic.
For their own articles. So if you have, a lot of guest authors on your site that return and contribute, you could enable for that user role. You could say only let them see stats for their own content. Then they can go to the analytics and if they've published five articles, they can see stats for just those five
[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that. That I think is what I was trying to get to in a roundabout way. Okay. Yeah, that's great. Andrew, sorry. Anything you wanted to add to that?
[00:26:09] Andrew Mead: Oh no. Yeah, I was just gonna say like those like user level rules apply at like a blanket level and then you could go into, if you had seven reports, that author could go to all seven reports and they're just looking at their data though, so yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty nice to just give them a little bit of, feedback on what's going on without exposing maybe things you don't want to expose, like WooCommerce sales or something along those
[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing that it, it's possible to export all of this data. Obviously it's nice to see it on the website, but really you wanna be taking this to board meetings and things like that, don't you? to justify your existence on the, in the company and things I all possible, I'm guessing in a variety of formats, PDFs, and, spreadsheets and whatnot.
Yep.
[00:26:51] Andrew Mead: Exactly. Yeah. We have CSV downloads for everything You could see, every single report can be exported as A PDF. You could have recurring emails of reports sent out to whoever you would like, whether it's yourself or whether it's stakeholders in your organization. So yeah, you have, you have access to all that data and at its most basic level you have the data in the database.
So if you're someone who's savvy with that sort of thing and there's an insight that you really wanna get at, but can't quite find a way to do, the data is there for you at its most basic level as well.
[00:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: So just getting back to the point I had at the beginning, and I'm really genuine about this, I could not work out Google Analytics in its most recent iteration. It, I got. I got furious before I got clever. it would just annoy the heck outta me. So I would give up that. That is basically what happened.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but there we go. I just didn't enjoy that experience and could never get the data back that I needed. So I'm gonna ask you this question. I'm gonna ask you to be brutally honest as well. Do you think that you've done a good job of tackling that? if I was to log in as a, newbie user, would I be able to consume data that was meaningful pretty quickly?
[00:28:03] Benjamin Sibley: Oh yeah. I would say immediately I think it's all, yeah, I think it's all very apparent. if you wanna see, okay, where's my traffic coming from? You might not know the word referrers, like that might be a new word for you, but that's a technical term. That's the term you use. Once you visit that page, you'll understand, okay, these are my traffic sources.
You can see in the table, very plainly. Google, x, Reddit, and all other sites sending you traffic. You can see a column for the visitors for the views, the bounce rate, any other columns you wanna show In the table, there's a button where you, it opens up a little modal window and you can toggle various columns on and off.
It really is, very easy. I don't think we've ever gotten someone emailing us saying I don't understand how to
use
[00:28:55] Nathan Wrigley: that's, perfect because how to describe it, that thing where you buy the, I don't know, the super duper device, like you buy a new TV or something like that and it, it looks great on the box, but you open it up and there's a thousand different buttons. You just wanna turn the thing on and browse through the channels, but you've got the, all these things that you've gotta do.
And honestly, the simple product that does one thing well. And just makes it straightforward, is often superior to the product, which has a gazillion different features, but takes a month to figure out what the heck is going on. So I commend you for taking that approach. I think that's probably what most of us need.
Obviously not, if your job is to be some sort of SEO and really nerd out on the Google Analytics stuff, fair enough. But for most people who are using WordPress with your 5,000 visits a month or whatever it may be, that seems like the perfect trade off.
[00:29:45] Andrew Mead: It's not designed for folks with analytics in some sort of degree title, right? It's made for regular people who are just trying to get insights and run their business successfully. And so I don't have a massive analytics background before we did this plugin. So there's certain features that we'd work on that Ben would pull it up in Google Analytics and be like, here's what I have to do to get that data right now, and.
it was crazy. I can't believe how deep in these dropdown menu stuff is. It's like literally three or four levels deep. And then once you're there, you're on a page that still doesn't quite, it's not just, it's not giving you what you want, it's giving you something weird. So with this, we've been super intentional about saying this is for the every man, right?
if. If I can't pull that page up and just quickly glance and get some interesting insight, then we've failed at our job of creating like, in independent analytics for the people of
[00:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you've been fairly opinionated, but that's basically what I think most of us need and the point that you make is exactly, my experience is just a menu, within a menu, and then you can't figure out what the heck. The data means, and then you go to some documentation, which was like stale from four years ago and the UI has completely changed and it's oh.
So that begs the question. You mentioned that there was a, you mentioned that there was an onboarding video to get you started. That's great. But the support for this, how do you run that? Obviously both of you are in North America. Do you have, I don't know, email support or do you have a help desk or how do people.
Should they run into a problem? How do they keep in touch with you?
[00:31:20] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, so we primarily handle support just over email. It's mostly me. Sometimes Andrew jumps in and we haven't had to scale beyond that. for our support, I've been very intentional about building a robust knowledge base and making sure that everything is answered. I get really, actually.
Hyper-focused on it. So we have a knowledge base with over a hundred articles. the search bar works really well. Use a plugin called Relevancy, which makes this, yeah, it's great. It made the search work amazingly right away. and then I have lots of pre-written responses and Help Scout. and then I added.
An AI chatbot, which chatbots in the past used to be horrible, but now that it's powered by chat, GPTI put that in there, trained it on our knowledge base, and now it works really
[00:32:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.
[00:32:15] Benjamin Sibley: yeah, we're upfront about, I, I named it, I think AI agent or something like that, I don't wanna confuse people, I don't want them to think it's a person, like I want them to know this is ai.
But the difference is you can email us and we'll give you a thoughtful response and help you out. And there are some times when you do need to email us, but. If you want an answer right now, immediately, then you can just ask, the chat bot. He's gonna figure it out. But I will even, I'll go through my emails, like I'll go through a previous month, I'll go through every single email and I'll ask myself, how can I never get this email
[00:32:51] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Nicely
[00:32:52] Benjamin Sibley: that's my goal. I don't want to answer anything twice. And sometimes you have to make a little tweak like. we had people asking us if we had an iPhone app or an Android app. And I, I wrote, yeah, which is not something we're gonna do anytime soon because that's like a whole other
[00:33:09] Andrew Mead: Yeah, sorry to dash hopes here, it's not
[00:33:11] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, we had an articles like, a question article saying, is it, can I use it on my phone?
And I wrote about how it's mobile friendly. We did make it responsive so it's not as nice on a phone, but you can use it on your phone. You can find all your data that way. But people were still asking me about it and I saw, okay, they're act. And I looked in our search queries, what people were searching for on our site, and I saw iPhone and Android, and we actually didn't have those words in the article, so we just had to go into the article and add the words, iPhone and Android, and now nobody asked me that
[00:33:45] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:33:45] Benjamin Sibley: So that.
[00:33:47] Nathan Wrigley: I think with a plugin like yours, support is all I remember talking to a plugin developer, and maybe this will resonate with you. Maybe you'll think this is nonsense, but he said, if you've got a successful, plugin business on some level. You are a support agent. you've just got, you've gotta deal with all that kind of stuff and being obsessive about it and writing the articles in advance and making sure that the question is never necessarily asked twice.
That's perfect. That's music to my ears. That's exactly what I want to hear.
[00:34:16] Andrew Mead: And you can't, you just can't not answer somebody. people
[00:34:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you, oh, you can. Yeah, you really can, but it's not
[00:34:23] Andrew Mead: No, you, yeah. You have to though. and to Ben's point too, so we've said AI five times already. So just a disclaimer. This product has no ai. We have no interest in adding ai.
All we're talking about is a chat bot, which is just fed off of the knowledge base. And you need a good knowledge base for that bot to be able to. To do anything. So you can't just skip the hard work Ben put in of writing all those articles and expect a bot to be good 'cause it's not fed on anything relevant.
But I was really impressed. You could ask it a weird question and it just knows the right article. It can pull in screenshots and stuff,
[00:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think when,
[00:34:57] Andrew Mead: good since there's just two of us. So if it's midnight, we're not awake, so you can get your answer.
[00:35:02] Nathan Wrigley: that. It's for that moment when both of you are asleep and somebody in Australia has a problem. I think AI is perfect with that. You feed it a corpus of information and it can really distill that because it's finite and it's bound. So that seems like a perfect use.
Okay, just a quick one then. We mentioned WS form a moment ago, so I'm just gonna open up that can and ask because it's the WordPress ecosystem. We've all got our favorite, this thing and that thing, like our favorite SEO plugin and our favorite. I know form plugin or whatever it may be. do you encourage other developers?
Do you have relationship with other developers such that they can hook in, supply you with data? I guess a. The form solution is a perfect example, isn't it? Because there is data flowing around the website based upon what people put in those forms. but do you know, do you accommodate things like e-commerce solutions?
There's several in the WordPress space now. Just, I'll just hand it over. do you accommodate third party plugins. Really?
[00:36:00] Andrew Mead: Absolutely. So for, I'll just start with forms since that's what you mentioned first. We integrate with, I think it's 22 or 23 different form
[00:36:06] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:36:07] Andrew Mead: So all the big players. And for a lot of that honestly it's not, it's not a ton of work. Most of these form plugins give you a hook that fires upon form submission.
That's obviously the thing we're interested in. So for most of them, it required no direct communication. There's definitely some exceptions and. People have been really helpful and useful, and in general, it doesn't require us to. exposed stuff. It's just them exposing when an event happened and some data about that event.
So it's usually on the person we're integrating with to have a hook available for us. If they have it, then we can, we can integrate with that. And for e-commerce, we integrate with four, I believe WooCommerce. Sure. Cart, and I'm forgetting the two others, but it's a similar situation where there's hooks for events, whether it's a sale, a refund, an order, status change.
We can just listen for those events to happen. We can update things in the database and then when you check your analytics, you can see the sales have gone up or the refunds have gone down. Those are both great things. So yeah, we have, integrations with e-commerce and forms and yeah,
[00:37:12] Nathan Wrigley: I would've thought e-commerce informs about spans where you'd want to get, where you'd want to be making your mark. I can't really think of anything else where that data wouldn't just be presenting itself on the page. And so it's just part of how people found your website anyway, but Okay. But that's good to know.
The, I'm looking at the, independent wp.com homepage, and if you scroll down, I don't know, roughly halfway, something like that. There's the, there's the features broken out into both the pro and the free. So I'll just list out the free. dashboard analytics, privacy friendly, made for WordPress.
That's my favorite one. referers report. Geographic data, device data. Saved reports, easy setup. Main, WP Extension. Actually, that's my second favorite. I'm a big fan of Main wp. So there was another integration, which was, that's really cool. And then we go,
[00:38:00] Andrew Mead: true and they were super helpful. Those are like, I can't believe how quick they would add stuff that was bespoke for us and had it live in production. It was, I wanna see how they work behind the scenes. 'cause it's definitely a well-oiled
[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: That is a, match made in heaven as well. That kind of thing. If you think about it. So I'm in there every day. I'm in main WP every day just updating plugins and things and so consuming analytics and displaying it on a dashboard and sending that out in client reports and things like that. I dunno if you've gone that far with them, they have this
[00:38:31] Andrew Mead: literally just went that far. It's all very new for Maine, wp, this all happened within the last
[00:38:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Okay. they, do this whole thing where you can inject whatever data you want, like plugins updated and things. And having the ability, yeah, having the ability to send out a report with, I don't know, just what were the most popular pages or something is really nice. okay.
Then we're on
[00:38:50] Andrew Mead: that's a good
[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. you heard it here
[00:38:53] Andrew Mead: so right now, when you go to the overview page for Main wp, there's obviously widgets that have data from not just one site, but for all of your sites. And we have one there where you can quickly switch through and get like a basic traffic graph just so you can see how a site's doing.
And then you can obviously click a button that brings you over to that child site to your main dashboard. Then, we also have the Pro Reports integration. So if you're sending out client reports right now, you can pull in total views, visitors and sessions. I do like the idea of pulling in popular posts or something along those lines.
There's still more work to be done there because it is new. and that's part of the problem too, is me and Ben do not manage agencies that use Main wp. So we are really working on customer feedback for this feature. People were very intentional about getting us to do the Pro Reports integration. It was the only thing people asked for when we dropped the first version.
So they know what they want and we're really just trying to listen to them on that one just so we can hit the right
[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: this is the best bit about doing stuff inside of WordPress is I imagine I had an idea for Google Analytics. There is no chance that I can communicate with the people and get that idea integrated. literally none. And yet here we are. We've got these two fellas on the line and and I'm getting good vibe.
So if you buy this product, I think these two are gonna be open to your suggestions. So if you've got a, if you've got an idea, they operate in North America time, I'm sure that they're gonna be available to listen to those ideas. And, I'm gonna move on to the pro things off your homepage.
So here's the things. That, are encapsulated inside the pro version. There'll be an exchange of money, no doubt. We'll figure that out in a minute. campaign links. So that's create and track custom campaign URLs. Got it. Real. Oh, nice. Real time analytics. So see things as they're happening. Click tracking.
Okay. e-commerce analytics. So I guess we've touched that a little bit. Form tracking, again, we've touched that a little bit. overview of data. Find data from all your reports in one place. And, this is a nice one, email reports. So the ability to get an HTML email out of. The, system, I guess scheduled.
So let's move then to the, the pricing, because that's gonna be important. There was, I think more than half of the stuff was free. So that's on the free version. if you go to, independent wp.com/pricing, as you might expect, you'd be able to download the free version of the plugin there.
The Pro versions Caviar mTOR, we're recording this in the middle of 2025. The price at the moment is $79 per year for one license, and they've got a whole bunch of different options. Three license, five, license 10, and unlimited Also. Nice to see. I like it anyway. is the, there's a little toggle. Yeah, there's a little toggle for lifetime.
so you can toggle one year, sorry, one site for a lifetime, three sites for a lifetime and so on. And obviously the price is gonna vary. and a 30 day money back guarantee, so that's nice as well. yeah.
[00:41:55] Andrew Mead: Just to make things, crystal clear too. If you go to your WordPress site and you add a new plugin and you search for analytics, we are there as a free plugin on the WordPress repository. There are no traffic limits if you get a million visitors a day, we don't put any of that behind a paywall. The things that come in pro are things that you're really using if you are making money, and you are really curious about those money making aspects of your site.
yeah, that's the. The dividing
[00:42:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So again, it's middle of 2025. Do you want to, have you got any kind of intel on roadmap features that you might be working on? Whether or not they land is not really Im important. It's just I just wanna get a flavor of the kind of things you're interested in the next six months, year, whatever.
[00:42:42] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah. So right now, a big feature that we're in the middle of is, it might be a little bit hard to explain over a podcast, but
[00:42:51] Nathan Wrigley: good luck.
[00:42:53] Benjamin Sibley: if you're looking at, a list of the pages. That and their visitors. You'll be able to click on a page and then see the traffic sources, the geolocations devices for that page.
So you could see, okay, I have this article, but where did the visitors come from for this particular article? You'll be able to see that. So you can see, okay, a hundred visitors from Google and this meeting from Reddit and so on. Same thing with all different countries and devices. So that's something we're working on right now.
that'll be available in all of the reports. and that's coming to the pro version. And then we've had a lot of requests for a user journeys feature.
[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:43:35] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah. and I fully understand like how valuable that can be because all the data is aggregated and in general, aggregated
[00:43:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:43:44] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, aggregated data, it's much more useful, generally speaking, but then to show it's, you don't wanna look at, the journey of the last a thousand people who visited your website, but you wanna look at maybe the last person who bought something or the last person who submitted a form. And so we, don't have that really ironed out yet, but we're gonna give people some way to be able to see, for a recent sale for instance, where did they come from and what are the pages that they looked at so they can just look at a few examples, get an idea of what's going on.
And, I think that'll be really cool data. And I know a lot of people are excited about
[00:44:20] Nathan Wrigley: that's fascinating. I guess you step into the whole GDPR thing, tracking people around, fingerprinting people and trying to figure out where the heck they've gone. And then I guess it's in the manner in which you keep that data and how anonymized it is and whether you can bind that particular sale to that particular user flow.
You got fun ahead trying
[00:44:39] Benjamin Sibley: Yeah, that's like the tricky part. And one reason we haven't done this quite yet, it will be tied, yeah, more to their sales and form submissions. I think what we need to figure out in terms of privacy aspect is when someone submit this, submits this form, they agree that you can store their name and info.
is there a way to. Maybe modify your prophecy policy so that they agree that retroactively their activity is combined. We have to figure that out. that will be an important factor. Hopefully we can find a really easy way for people to do this so that it's seamless or maybe they just have to check a box somewhere to make sure they know what's
[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: I think those sound really great. what? I'm just getting good vibes. Basically, you seem to be in this for the long haul. I dunno if this is what you do primarily now the pair of
you.
[00:45:30] Andrew Mead: we are three years in, and this is both of our full-time jobs. We take independent analytics very seriously. So if you use it and something's up and you email us, these two people will be talking to you within a few hours.
[00:45:43] Nathan Wrigley: honestly,
[00:45:45] Andrew Mead: it's been very exciting to run to.
[00:45:46] Nathan Wrigley: it's so interesting. I don't know if you've got the same intuition as me, but this is basically what happens when I go on a journey to a brand new website, be it a WordPress plugin or whatever. I land on the homepage. And I scoot around a little bit on the homepage and then I end up on the pricing page within 10 seconds, maybe 20 seconds.
I'm on the pricing 'cause I wanna see what it costs. And the next thing I wanna find is the about page. 'cause I wanna find out. Then I wanna see who are the people, because this is sticking stuff in my WordPress website is not like buying a pair of shoes from Amazon. I wanna know who you are.
and I think the pair of you have done a really credible job today of, just saying who you are. And we get an impression, this is what you do. You're in it for all the right reasons, and, and it's available. so hopefully that, this podcast will have cemented your reputation in the, in the minds of a bunch of people.
yeah, I think, I think we've done a good job. Independent wp.com. Did I miss anything?
Oh, I did. I did miss, yeah, I
[00:46:53] Andrew Mead: It's,
[00:46:54] Nathan Wrigley: knot. Yeah,
[00:46:55] Andrew Mead: it's, just WP builds no spaces. Just spell it out and, that'll get you 10% off. And like we said too, if you have any questions, we are here. So just shoot us an email and that's, you're gonna get a response.
[00:47:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. I will put that into the preamble that comes before this interview, but we've said it again in the podcast Main now, so yeah, very kindly. I didn't solicit that. These chaps just offered it up for, for free. So I appreciate that WP builds all as one word. it's in caps in the show notes, so I'll.
Stick with that, And that will get you 10% off, all of the pro packages that we're on offer. That's great. Thank you so much. without further ado then, I guess Ben and Andrew, thank you very much for chatting to me today. All the best. I hope it's a real success for you both in the future.
Good luck.
[00:47:43] Andrew Mead: Thank you. Yeah, it's been, fun to be on.
[00:47:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all I've got time for this week. I hope that you enjoyed that. Really fascinating product. I hope that you go and check them out. Independent Analytics. Really looks credible. Don't forget that for 10% off, you can use the coupon code WPBUILDS at the checkout. That will get you 10% off Independent Analytics Pro. I hope that you make use of that.
Don't forget also that if you want to make a comment about this episode, head to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 426, and leave us a comment there.
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Okay, that's really nearly it. Don't forget, we'll be back on Monday for the This Week in WordPress show. We do it live joined by a panel of experts, wpbuilds.com/live, 2:00 PM UK time. We'll parcel it up as a podcast episode, which will come out on Tuesday. And we'll also be back next Thursday for a podcast episode just like this.
So now we get the cheesy music usually generated by ai, which really, really does stamp its credentials as cheesy. I hope that you enjoy that. Stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
