Skip to main content
Web analytics gives you a familiar Google Analytics-style dashboard while keeping your data private and under your control. Track pageviews, sessions, bounce rates, and referrers without sending data to third parties.

​
What you get

Web analytics focuses on website metrics that marketing and growth teams need:
  • Traffic metrics: Pageviews, unique visitors, sessions, bounce rate
  • Referrer tracking: See where visitors come from (organic search, social, direct)
  • Page performance: Top pages, entry/exit pages, time on page
  • Real-time visitors: Live view of who’s on your site right now
  • Device breakdown: Mobile vs desktop vs tablet traffic
Web analytics uses the same PostHog snippet as product analytics. No additional installation required.

​
Dashboard overview

The web analytics dashboard provides a high-level view of your site traffic:
1

Top-level metrics

See total visitors, pageviews, session duration, and bounce rate at a glance. Compare to the previous period to spot trends.
2

Traffic sources

Break down where visitors arrive from: organic search, paid ads, social media, referrals, or direct traffic.
3

Page analytics

View your most visited pages, average time on each page, and bounce rates per page.
4

Geographic data

See which countries and cities your visitors come from, helpful for localization decisions.

​
Key features

​
Real-time visitors

See who’s on your site right now:
  1. Navigate to Web analytics → Live
  2. View active sessions in real-time
  3. See current page paths and session duration
  4. Filter by referrer source or device type
Use this during product launches, marketing campaigns, or content releases to monitor immediate impact.

​
UTM parameter tracking

Track marketing campaigns with UTM parameters: 
https://yoursite.com/landing?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=product_launch
PostHog automatically captures UTM parameters:
  • utm_source: Traffic source (google, twitter, newsletter)
  • utm_medium: Marketing medium (cpc, social, email)
  • utm_campaign: Campaign name (summer_sale, product_launch)
  • utm_content: Specific ad or link
  • utm_term: Paid search keywords
Filter web analytics by UTM parameters to measure campaign performance:
  1. Open Web analytics → Marketing
  2. See breakdown by source, medium, and campaign
  3. Compare conversion rates across campaigns

​
Web vitals

Monitor page performance with Core Web Vitals:
  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Loading performance
  • FID (First Input Delay): Interactivity
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Visual stability
Access web vitals at Web analytics → Web vitals to:
  • Identify slow-loading pages
  • Track performance over time
  • Compare vitals across devices
  • Find pages that need optimization
Web vitals require modern browsers that support the Web Vitals API. Coverage is approximately 90% of users.

​
Path analysis

Understand how visitors navigate your site:
  1. Go to Web analytics → Page reports
  2. Select a page to analyze
  3. View entry pages (where visitors came from)
  4. View exit pages (where they went next)
  5. See drop-off points in the user journey

​
Privacy and compliance

Web analytics is built for privacy compliance:
  • No cookies required: Track sessions without cookie consent banners
  • IP anonymization: Optionally anonymize IP addresses
  • GDPR friendly: Full control over data storage and retention
  • No third-party sharing: All data stays in your infrastructure
Set privacy options in your PostHog snippet:
posthog.init('<ph_project_api_key>', {
  api_host: '<ph_instance_address>',
  
  // Disable session recording for web analytics only
  disable_session_recording: true,
  
  // Anonymize IP addresses
  ip: false,
  
  // Respect Do Not Track
  respect_dnt: true
})

​
Marketing analytics

Connect web analytics to marketing attribution:

Track campaign ROI

Connect web analytics to conversion events. See which campaigns drive signups and revenue, not just traffic.

Compare channel performance

Break down conversion rates by referrer source. Identify your highest-quality traffic channels.

Optimize landing pages

See bounce rates and session duration per landing page. Find underperforming pages that need work.

Attribution analysis

Use product analytics to build multi-touch attribution models with web analytics as the foundation.

​
Common use cases

Goal: Measure blog performance
  1. Filter web analytics to /blog/* paths
  2. Track top posts by pageviews
  3. Monitor bounce rate per post
  4. See referrer sources for each article
  5. Track conversion from blog to signup

​
Integration with product analytics

Web analytics works seamlessly with product analytics:
  • Start with web analytics for visitor tracking
  • Add product analytics for post-signup behavior
  • Build complete funnel from first visit to power user
  • Use same installation, same data model, same interface

​
Migration from Google Analytics

Switching from GA is straightforward:
  1. Install PostHog: Add snippet alongside GA initially
  2. Compare data: Run both tools in parallel for 1-2 weeks
  3. Rebuild dashboards: Recreate your key GA reports in PostHog
  4. Remove GA: Drop GA once you’re confident in PostHog data
PostHog counts sessions differently than GA4. Expect slight variations in session metrics during comparison.

​
Best practices

Create a UTM naming convention and stick to it. Use lowercase, underscores instead of spaces, and descriptive campaign names.
Don’t just track visits. Define conversion goals (signups, purchases, downloads) and measure them alongside traffic metrics.
Check web vitals weekly. Page speed directly impacts conversion rates and SEO rankings.
Mobile users behave differently than desktop. Always check if metrics vary significantly by device.

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get started for freeTalk to us