# Understanding Your Analytics

Tinylytics provides a clean, privacy-focused dashboard that helps you understand your website traffic without compromising your visitors' data. This guide explains the metrics available to you and how to interpret them.

## Privacy First

Unlike traditional analytics tools, Tinylytics does not use cookies, local storage, or fingerprinting to track users across the web.

-   **No Cookies**: We do not store any files on your visitors' devices.
-   **GDPR/CCPA Compliance**: Because we don't collect personal data, you generally do not need to display annoying cookie consent banners for our script.
-   **Data Ownership**: You own your data. You can export it or delete it at any time.

## The Dashboard

When you view a site in Tinylytics, you are presented with the **Overview** tab. This is your main analytics hub.

### The Chart
The main chart displays traffic trends over time. You can toggle between different time periods (e.g., Last 24 Hours, 7 Days, 30 Days) to see how your traffic is performing.

-   **Hits**: The total number of times your pages were loaded.
-   **Unique Hits**: (If enabled) An approximation of unique visitors based on anonymous daily hashes.

### Breakdown Metrics

Below the main chart, you will find detailed breakdowns of your traffic:

#### Top Pages
Shows which specific pages on your site are the most popular. This helps you identify what content resonates most with your audience.

#### Referrers
Shows where your traffic is coming from.

-   **Direct**: Visitors who typed your URL directly or clicked a bookmark.
-   **External Sites**: Links from other websites (e.g., Twitter, Google, other blogs).
-   **Internal**: Traffic moving between pages on your own site (often hidden by default to keep stats clean).

**Why do I only see the domain (e.g. linkedin.com, google.com) and not the full page or search keywords?**  
Tinylytics records whatever the browser sends in the referrer. That is controlled by the **referring site** and the browser’s **Referrer-Policy**, not by Tinylytics. Many sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Google) use a policy like `strict-origin-when-cross-origin`, so for cross-origin clicks only the *origin* (e.g. `https://www.linkedin.com`) is sent—no path, so you cannot see which specific post or profile. **Google does not include search terms in the referrer**; that has been the case since 2012 for privacy. To see search keywords for your site, use [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console). For links you control (newsletters, social posts, ads), you can add UTM parameters to your links to identify campaigns and sources.

#### Countries
A geographic breakdown of your visitors. This is determined using the visitor's IP address, which is discarded immediately after the country lookup is performed.

#### Browsers & Platforms
Understand the technology your visitors are using:

-   **Browsers**: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.
-   **Platforms**: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, etc.

## Insights

The **Insights** tab provides deeper analysis and automated suggestions based on your traffic patterns. Tinylytics analyzes your data to find trends, such as:

-   Spikes in traffic compared to previous periods.
-   New top-performing content.
-   Changes in referrer sources.

## Managing Your Data

### Exporting Data
You can download your raw analytics data at any time.

1.  Go to your site's dashboard.
2.  Click the **Export** button (usually found in the site settings or bottom of the dashboard).
3.  Choose **CSV** format to download a file compatible with Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets.

### Ignoring Traffic
You can prevent your own visits (or specific paths) from skewing your data.

-   **Ignore Paths**: In the **Edit** tab, you can specify URL patterns to ignore (e.g., `/admin`).
-   **Ignore Your Browser**: You can set a special flag in your browser so Tinylytics ignores your personal visits. See [Ignoring your hits](/docs/ignore_your_hits) for details.

## Public Statistics

Want to show off your traffic? You can make your analytics dashboard public.

1.  Navigate to the **Edit** tab for your site.
2.  Toggle **Public Stats** to "On".
3.  You will be given a public URL that you can share with anyone.