# Guide to Insights

## What are Insights?

Insights is an AI-powered feature that analyses your website's traffic data and turns important changes into clear, useful explanations. Instead of manually interpreting your analytics, Insights detects meaningful signals first, then summarises what those signals mean in plain language.

Each day, Insights examines your traffic data from the past week and generates a report covering:

- **Summary**: A short AI explanation of what changed most this week.
- **Signals**: Reusable highlights such as traffic changes, page breakouts, referrer surges, audience shifts, and live spikes.
- **Traffic Patterns**: When your visitors are most active, peak days and hours, and unusual spikes or trends.
- **Best Performing Content**: Which pages are getting the most attention and why certain content might be resonating with your audience.
- **Recommendations**: 2-3 specific, actionable suggestions based on your data—content ideas, engagement tips, or areas to focus on.

## How It Works

1. **Data Collection**: Insights analyses the past 7 days of your site's traffic, including page views, referrers, geographic data, device breakdown, and timing patterns.
2. **Signal Detection**: Tinylytics looks for meaningful changes like traffic jumps, rising pages, new referrers, audience shifts, and recent spikes.
3. **AI Analysis**: The detected signals and supporting analytics are turned into a short summary, deeper explanation, and recommendations.
4. **Daily Generation**: Insights are generated automatically at 1:00 AM in your timezone, so you have fresh analysis waiting for you each morning.

## Requirements

Insights is a premium feature available to **subscribed users**. To generate insights, your site needs:

- At least **10 hits in the past 7 days** (to ensure there's enough data for meaningful analysis)
- An active subscription (insights are paused during expired trials)

## Setting Up Insights

1. Log in to your Tinylytics account and select your site.
2. Navigate to the **Insights** tab in the dashboard.
3. Click the **Enable Insights** button.

Once enabled, Tinylytics will queue an initial insight generation. If your site meets the minimum traffic requirement, you'll see your first insight shortly.

## Personalising Your Insights

You can customise how insights are generated to better match your needs:

1. Click the **Insights Settings** button on the Insights page.
2. Add **Custom Instructions** to guide the AI. For example:
   - "Make it casual and friendly"
   - "Focus on my blog posts, skip traffic tips"
   - "I'm interested in mobile vs desktop trends"
   - "Keep recommendations focused on content ideas"
3. Click **Save Settings** to apply your preferences.

Custom instructions take effect the next time insights are generated.

## Daily Email Reports

Want your insights delivered to your inbox? Enable the **Send daily insights via email** option in Insights Settings. You'll receive a summary email each morning from `insights@echo.tinylytics.app` with your latest analysis.

## Understanding Your Insights

### Summary

This is the quick read. It explains the most important changes from the week in one or two sentences, so you can understand the shape of things before digging into details.

### Signals

Signals are the building blocks behind each insight. You might see things like:

- "Traffic is up 28% this week"
- "`/blog/rails-tips` is gaining traction"
- "news.ycombinator.com started sending visitors"
- "More visitors are browsing on mobile"

### Traffic Patterns

This section highlights when your visitors are most active. You might learn things like:

- "Your site sees the most traffic on Tuesdays, with a 40% increase compared to weekends."
- "Peak activity occurs around 2 PM, suggesting your audience is browsing during lunch breaks."

### Best Performing Content

Discover which pages are resonating with your audience:

- "Your recent blog post about photography tips attracted 3x more views than your average page."
- "The About page continues to be a strong entry point, suggesting visitors want to learn more about you."

### Recommendations

Actionable suggestions tailored to your data:

- "Consider publishing more content on Tuesdays to capitalise on your peak traffic day."
- "Your photography content is performing well—a follow-up post could build on this momentum."

## Viewing Previous Insights

The Insights page displays your most recent insight prominently, with previous insights listed below. This history helps you track trends over time and see how recommendations have evolved.

## Disabling Insights

If you no longer want to receive insights:

1. Open **Insights Settings** on the Insights page.
2. Click **Disable Insights** at the bottom of the settings panel.
3. Confirm your choice.

You can re-enable insights at any time from the same page.

## Privacy Considerations

Insights analyses only the anonymised traffic data that Tinylytics already collects. No additional tracking is added, and no personal visitor information is shared with the AI. The analysis is based on aggregate patterns, not individual visitor behaviour.

## Tips for Getting the Most from Insights

- **Check regularly**: While insights are generated daily, reviewing them weekly can help you spot longer-term trends.
- **Watch the signals first**: They tell you what actually changed, so you can decide where to spend attention.
- **Use custom instructions**: Tailor the analysis to what matters most to you.
- **Act on recommendations**: The suggestions are based on your actual data—try implementing one or two and see how your traffic responds.
- **Compare over time**: Look at how your traffic patterns change week to week using the insights history.