Settings Guide

The Settings page is your central hub for customizing WP Insights Pro to fit your exact needs. This guide provides a detailed explanation of every option available, organized by section, to help you get the most out of your analytics.

General Settings

This section contains the master controls for the plugin and basic user interface preferences.

• Enable Tracking: This is the main on/off switch for the entire plugin. When enabled, the tracking script will be active on your website. When disabled, no new data will be collected.
• Default Date Range: Choose the period that loads by default when you visit a report page. The default is “Last 15 Days.” A shorter range like “Last 7 Days” ensures that on-demand reports generate very quickly, even on high-traffic sites. A longer range like “Last 30 Days” provides more data but may take a few extra seconds to generate the first time you view it.
• Enable Comparison: When checked, the scorecards on your main Dashboard will automatically show a percentage change comparison to the previous period (e.g., “Last 7 Days” will be compared to the 7 days prior). This is a powerful way to spot trends at a glance.
• Delete Data on Uninstall: If you check this box, all analytics data stored by the plugin (log files, report files, etc.) in your /wp-content/uploads/ directory will be permanently deleted when you uninstall the plugin. Use with caution. By default, we leave your data intact.
• Delete Settings on Uninstall: When checked, the plugin’s settings (stored in the WordPress options table) will be removed upon uninstallation.

Tracking Exclusions & Privacy

This is where you fine-tune who gets tracked, ensuring your data is clean and your site is compliant with privacy regulations.

• IP Address Handling: This is a critical privacy feature. We strongly recommend “Standard Anonymization” for most sites to comply with GDPR.
  • Standard Anonymization: Sets the last part of a visitor’s IP to 0 (e.g., 123.45.67.89 becomes 123.45.67.0).
  • Stronger Anonymization: Sets the last two parts to 0 (e.g., 123.45.0.0). This is even more private but may reduce city-level geolocation accuracy.
  • Store Full IP Address: Stores the complete IP address. Only use this if you have a clear legal basis and have updated your privacy policy accordingly.
• Exclude User Roles: Check any user roles (e.g., Administrator, Editor) that you do not want to track. This is essential for preventing your own team’s activity from skewing your analytics data.
• Exclude Known Bots/Crawlers: When enabled (highly recommended), WP Insights Pro uses an extensive, up-to-date list to identify and ignore traffic from search engine crawlers and other known bots.
• Respect “Do Not Track” (DNT): If a visitor’s browser sends the “Do Not Track” signal, enabling this option will prevent our script from tracking them.
• User-Agent Exclusion List: For advanced cases, you can add specific strings to this list (one per line). If a visitor’s User-Agent contains any of these strings, their visit will not be logged. This is useful for blocking specific monitoring services or internal tools.
• Enable Test Mode for Admins: If enabled, visits by logged-in users with the “Administrator” role will be tracked. To protect your privacy while testing, these visits are logged with a randomized IP address instead of your real one. This setting overrides the “Exclude User Roles” option for administrators only.

Tracking Settings

Customize the specific data points you want to collect.

• Custom Parameters to Track: This powerful feature lets you track your own specific URL parameters. It’s perfect for measuring campaigns from platforms that don’t use standard UTM tags, like LinkedIn (li_fat_id) or TikTok (ttclid). Simply add the parameter key (one per line). The data will appear in the Acquisition > Custom Channels report.

Auto-Tracked Events

This is where you enable the “no-code” event tracking, allowing you to measure key interactions without writing any JavaScript.

• Tracked Click Events: Define events that fire when a user clicks on an element.
• Tracked View Events: Define events that fire when a user scrolls and an element becomes visible on their screen.

The fields work as follows:

• CSS Selector: The most important field. Enter a CSS class (like .my-button) or an ID (like #header-cta) to target the element(s) you want to track. Most page builders make it easy to add a class or ID to any element.
• Event Category: The broad group for your event. Think of it like a folder. Example: CTA, Form, Video.
• Event Action: The specific action the user took. Example: Click, Submit, Play.
• Event Label (Optional): Provides extra detail to identify what was interacted with. Example: Header Buy Button, Contact Page Form, Homepage Intro Video.
• Event Value (Optional): A number you can associate with the event. This is useful for assigning a weight or score to an interaction. For example, you could assign a value of 50 to a “Case Study Download” event but only 10 to a “Newsletter Signup,” or you could track the price of a product added to a cart.

Goals & Conversions

Turn your tracked data into business intelligence by defining what success looks like for your site.

• Goal Name: A human-readable name for your conversion (e.g., “Newsletter Signup”).
• Goal Type:
  • Page Visit: The goal is completed when a user visits a specific URL. Perfect for “thank you” or confirmation pages.
  • Event Match: The goal is completed when a specific event (that you’ve set up in “Auto-Tracked Events” or with our JS API) is fired.
• Matching Rule:
  • For Page Visits: Choose how to match the URL (URL is, URL starts with, URL contains) and enter the path (e.g., /thank-you/).
  • For Event Matches: Simply click the dropdown menu, it contains a live-updated list of all the “Auto-Tracked Events” you’ve configured on this page. You can choose to track a broad category, a specific action, or a complete event with a label. Just select the interaction you want to count as a conversion, and you’re done.
• Goal Value (Optional): Assign a monetary or point value to a conversion to measure its impact.

Important: If you rename a Category, Action, or Label in the “Auto-Tracked Events” section, you must also manually update any goals that use that event by re-selecting it from the dropdown.

Geolocation

Configure the source of your geographic data.

• MaxMind License Key: WP Insights Pro ships with a basic, country-level geolocation database. To unlock automatically updated city-level data, you need to add a free license key from MaxMind GeoLite2. We highly recommend this for the best possible insights.

Data Management

Control how long your analytics data is stored on your server.

• Raw Log Retention (Months): Determines how long the raw, line-by-line log files are kept.
  • A shorter period (e.g., 3-6 months) saves disk space.
  • A longer period allows you to re-aggregate historical reports from scratch if you ever need to (for example, after a settings change).
  • Set to 0 to keep raw logs forever (not recommended for sites with high traffic).
• Report Retention (Months): Determines how long the processed monthly .json report files are kept. You can typically keep these for much longer than raw logs as they are much smaller. Set to 0 to keep your monthly reports forever.
• Custom Range Cache Retention (Days): Sets how long the cache for on-demand date range reports is kept.

Advanced Settings

Fine-tune the core mechanics of the tracking engine.

• Session Timeout (Minutes): The period of inactivity (by default, 30 minutes) after which a visitor’s session is considered ended.
• On-Demand Batch Threshold (MB): This is an advanced performance setting that ensures your server remains stable when you request reports for very long custom date ranges. When you request a report, the plugin estimates the total size of the data it needs to process.
  • If the size is below this threshold, the report is generated immediately.
  • If the size is above this threshold, the plugin automatically switches to a safer, step-by-step browser-based processor that shows a progress bar to prevent server timeouts.
  • The default value is safe for most hosting environments, and the recommendation shown below the field is calculated based on your specific server’s max_execution_time. You should only lower this value if you experience timeouts when generating reports.