Pirsch Analytics

2025 has almost ended, and as it is tradition by now, we've published our recap of the year!

Read it on our blog here:

https://pirsch.io/blog/our-recap-of-2025/

We're thrilled to announce the release of the Pirsch Analytics WordPress Plugin v2.0! This major release brings powerful new features, significant improvements, and important fixes that make website analytics on WordPress using Pirsch easier and more flexible.

Embedded Dashboard

Access your Pirsch Analytics dashboard directly within your WordPress admin panel. No more switching between tabs – monitor your website's performance without leaving WordPress.

Enhanced Control Options

• Global Tracking Toggle: Disable tracking entirely with a single click

• Logged-in User Toggle: Choose whether to track logged-in users or exclude them from your analytics

• JavaScript Snippet Option: Now supports both, server-side and client-side tracking methods, or you can combine both of them

Smart Filtering

• Automatic Favicon Filtering: favicon.ico requests are now filtered out by default, giving you cleaner analytics data

• Improved Page Path Filter: Enhanced filtering capabilities for more precise tracking control

Redesigned User Interface

We've completely overhauled the plugin interface to be more intuitive and streamlined. The new UI makes configuration faster and more user-friendly.

Simplified Authentication

Breaking Change: We've removed the client ID + secret authentication method in favor of the simpler and easier-to-use access keys system. You now only need to create a client using an access key on the Integration Settings Page instead of a full oAuth client.

Critical Fixes

• Caching Plugin Compatibility: we ensured that the plugin now works with caching plugins like WPRocket and others

• Proper Cleanup: Fixed an issue where plugin settings were incorrectly removed during deactivation instead of uninstallation, ensuring your configuration is preserved when temporarily disabling the plugin.

• Proxy Header Support: Enhanced support for X-Forwarded-For and Forwarded proxy headers, ensuring accurate visitor tracking behind reverse proxies.

Upgrade Instructions

Important: Due to the authentication changes, you'll need to:

1. Update to version 2.0

2. Replace your old client ID + secret with a new access key from your Pirsch dashboard

3. Review your new tracking options and configure them according to your needs

Get Version 2.0 Now

Update through your WordPress admin dashboard or download directly from the WordPress plugin repository.

Also if you like it, feel free to leave us a review :)

Non-interactive Events

We now support non-interactive custom events. They are created by simply adding the non-interactive parameter in JavaScript. There are also options for the API, HTML attributes, and CSS classes.

Unlike regular events, a session will be counted as bounced if there are no subsequent page views or events without the parameter set.

More Dashboard Customization Options

The dashboard now offers more fine-grained customization options. You can disable individual parts of the filter bar and the live view option.

Autocompletion for Funnels and Conversion Goals

Creating funnels and conversion goals used to be error-prone because you had to type in the exact value you wanted to filter for. This process has now been greatly improved with autocompletion for all filter fields.

Browser and OS Filters in Funnels

The filter options for the browser and operating system were missing from the funnels. This has now been fixed.

Going Back in the Graph

Another quality-of-life improvement is the new button that allows you to return to the daily view when filtering by hour. After selecting a time on the graph or choosing a start and end time from the drop-down menu, you can click the up arrow to return to the daily view.

Start the Week on Monday or Sunday

A new setting has been added that allows you to start the week on Sunday instead of Monday. Monday is the default, but Sunday is more common in the U.S. and a few other countries, so now you can choose which day the week should start on.

This change will affect the weekly statistics. Visitors who previously visited on Sunday and were assigned to the previous week will now count towards the current week.

Custom Comparison Mode Dates

The custom date fields for comparison mode no longer enforce specific dates. For example, selecting a period longer than the current one previously set the dates to match the length of the current period. This is no longer the case, and you can now choose any period.

However, this also means that you need to ensure that the comparison makes sense. For instance, comparing a week to the previous month might not make much sense, but it's now possible.

Other Changes and Improvements Worth Mentioning

• We've added documentation links to empty pages in cases where no dashboard, funnel, or link has been created yet

• Greatly improved bot filtering using a custom IP block list (GDPR-compliant, of course)

• Improved query performance

We hope you enjoy this release! Please let us know if you encounter any problems or have any questions.

You can find the full [changelog](https://docs.pirsch.io/changelog#_2-12-0) in our documentation.

We are pleased to announce the next major update for Pirsch! This time we tried to incorporate as many of your requests as possible. Let's get started!

Annotations in the Top Graphs

Annotations can now be added to the top graphs to mark important milestones, events, or anything else you want to highlight! Simply click the Add Annotation icon to create a new annotation, enter a label and select a time.

Once the annotation is created, it appears on all graphs. They work to the minute. You can click an annotation to see a list of all annotations for that day, and then edit or remove them.

Create Conversion Goals From the Top Drop-Down Menu

Conversion goals can now be created from the dropdown at the top. Simple, but effective!

Filter Funnels and Short Links

To make organizing your funnels and short links easier, you can now filter them by tags. You can search for and select one or more tags from the new dropdown on the funnel and link pages. It's also possible to search for a funnel or link directly by typing a tag in the search field next to the dropdown.

AI Traffic Channel

A new traffic source channel for AI has been added. You can find it in the Pages panel of the main dashboard. This will make it easier to see traffic coming from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or most other AI tools. If we've missed a tool, please contact support and we'll add it.

Please note that we filter out bot traffic. The AI channel contains human requests with an AI as the referrer.

DuckDuckGo Browser Detection and Icon

We now detect the DuckDuckGo browser and display an icon for it.

Hourly Filter

If you have selected a specific hour of the day from the time period selection or by clicking on the graphs, it will now display the selected times. You can also use your arrow keys or the arrow icons to move through a single day.

Filter Name Changes

We've renamed the includes and excludes filters to contains and not contains respectivly to make them easier to understand.

Other Changes

Here are some other notable changes:

• Signing in on a custom domain now displays a neutral meta title and description instead of the Pirsch brand

• Filter options are now loaded as you type. This allows access to all filter options, not just the top 1000

• Session cards now show the year instead of just the day and month the session was created

• Session cards no longer show the exit page if the session was bounced (same as the entry page)

You can find the full changelog in our documentation.

Happy New Year! This is our first major update of the year, and we're happy to announce that Pirsch now has a built-in URL shortener!

The newly added Links page allows you to create short links that reliably track the source and UTM parameters. Unlike other link shorteners, this one is directly connected to your dashboard, making tracking the traffic source accurate and giving you access to the information in the same dashboard as your regular analytics data. Third-party URL shorteners collect their own analytics data and rely on URL parameters to forward information that can be stripped by ad blockers and the like.

The URL Shortener is available to everyone. However, the Plus plan has some additional features. These are:

• Redirects based on country of origin, language and operating system

• Link expiration and redirection to a special page when expired

• Password protected links

• Webhooks

• Customizable meta title, description, and social media image

• Theming

The link dialog may look a bit intimidating at first, but for a simple redirect you only need to fill in the name and a URL. Here is an example.

Once created, the link will be created as https://pir.sh/something. You can copy and share it.

We recommend to create one link per source. So, let's say you're running a paid ad campaign on Facebook. In that case, create a new link "Facebook Ad" and add "https://facebook.com" as the referrer and optinally set the UTM parameters (you can use our UTM generator if you like). For your LinkedIn ad, you should create a second link to differentiate them. When a visitor clicks on of the two links, the session will be created right on the redirect page, which is another benefit over other URL shorteners.

When clicking on a password-protected link, visitors are prompted to enter the password before being redirected. Otherwise, they are immediately redirected.

Clicks are tracked as regular custom events on the dashboard. Expanding the card on the links page will filter for the event and display the unique number of visitors. You can also select a specific URL to view the results.

Other Changes

Of course we also made some other changes. Funnels can now be tagged for better organization (you can enter a tag in the filter). Tagging also works for links. We also fixed the growth arrow in the chart tooltip, as it wasn't displayed correctly in some browsers.

You can find the full changelog in our documentation.

I’m happy to announce that Pirsch has performed better than ever this year. We continued to add exciting new features, increased MRR, onboarded new enterprise customers, and received a lot of helpful feedback from you. Before I start, I’d like to say THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us over the years.

The main purpose of this article is to give you some insight into what it’s like to be a “mid-sized” SaaS.

The Numbers

Let’s start with the numbers:

• We grew our MRR from ~$6,000 to ~$11,000 (+83%)

• Monthly growth rate was 1.4%

• Net volume was ~$114,000

• Subscribers grew from 432 to 553

• We added two new enterprise customers

• Employees grew from 0 to 1 (one of the two founders)

Overall, we almost doubled our MRR, which I think is really good and I hope that trend will continue.

The Features

Here’s a quick summary of what’s new and what we’ve improved in 2024:

• A comparison mode to compare statistics with the previous period

• Tag-based segmentation to support A/B testing

• View sessions individually

• Webhooks for custom events

• Traffic spike notifications and alerts

• Tracking by region and country map

• Dashboard translated into multiple languages

• A new “excludes” filter

• Multi-step marketing funnels!

• Google Analytics 4 import

• Tracking of hostnames and attribution channels

• Visitors by day and hour graph

• Improved email reports

And so much more! Looking back at our changelog, it feels crazy what we have accomplished in just one year. Mostly this has to do with our personal situation, which comes next.

Our Personal Situation

As you can see from the numbers and progress above, we now have one of us (me) working full time on Pirsch. We did this right at the beginning of 2024 and it has helped a lot to increase our output and reduce stress. I used to work for an agency and spent about 60% of my time working on Pirsch. This meant that I worked 2 days at the agency and at least 3 days a week on Pirsch. This of course meant that I had a relatively low income combined with a lot of pressure when I couldn’t respond to incidents or customer requests.

Fully committing to Pirsch was really overdue and helped a lot to reduce my stress level. It also allowed me to focus on improving and fixing as much as possible, reducing manual maintenance and support requests. It is really stressful not being able to respond to urgent support requests while working on another job.

Daniel is now working as an engineer, which is what he wanted to do and which is fine for us. He’ll continue to work on Pirsch from time to time, mostly in the design department.

Being In the Weird State of a Mid-Sized SaaS

I’m sure you’ve read success and failure stories before, but as a mid-sized SaaS, you really feel the pressure from all sides. As a “winner” you worry about smaller competitors growing to compete with you or new players entering the market with big (VC) budgets. As a “loser”, you never really got to the point where it’s worth worrying about competition. In this case, you can write off your SaaS as a failure and keep looking for a better idea to work on.

A “winner” doesn’t necessarily have the better product.

If you’re a “loser” and your SaaS doesn’t make money, it’s not necessarily a failure. It’s always worth a try.

As a mid-sized SaaS, we’re threatened by both the “winners” and the “losers”.

The winners have obviously taken most of the market share. Potential customers hear about them first, and most customers don’t really try different options before deciding which is best for them. This is especially frustrating when the competition had a first mover advantage. Although we were relatively early in the privacy-friendly analytics market, there was already strong competition. Being early usually means getting more attention and backlinks, which gives a product an “unfair” advantage. It’s extremely difficult to compete with other SaaS products that are considered standard by some, although when we talk to customers, they often switched to us from another tool after hearing about and trying Pirsch.

On the other side, there are the “losers” (including new competitors who aren’t neccessarly bad, but don’t have market share yet). When something looks simple, like our dashboard, people assume it’s easy to replicate. This leads to cheap alternatives that are produced in a relatively short amount of time, flooding the market and drawing even more attention away from our product.

Considering the market situtation and our MRR, we’re in a situation where we are “too rich to die and too poor to live”. That’s probably a very German thing to say, but it means that we make enough money to sustain ourselves, but not enough to really make it worth our while. I could make a lot more money working as a regular developer. On the other hand, I have a lot of freedoms and it’s a lot of fun working on our own project. I always had trouble motivating myself to work on other people’s dreams.

That said, I hope Pirsch will continue to grow slowly over time, but we’re also looking at other product ideas. We’re not going to put Pirsch into “maintenance mode”, but I feel like we need to start reducing our risk by running more than one product. But first, there’s a lot more to do with Pirsch however, and I hope you’re as excited about it as we are!

Plans for 2025

In 2025, we’re going to continue working on Pirsch and improve it as much as possible. Talking to our existing and potential new (enterprise) customers, we learned a lot about their pain points that we want to address.

One of them is reliable tracking of link clicks. So we started working on a link shortener that is directly integrated into Pirsch. This allows for much better analysis of external link clicks and ad attribution. Connecting it directly to the analytics tool means that we can track clicks on your dashboard instead of relying on query parameters or other connection points passed by an external tool. It also saves you money, as these tools are often priced similarly to Pirsch itself.

Next we want to work on the API version 2.0. We’ve always been in a unique position because Pirsch can be considered the only true “analytics as a platform” solution today. Our customers often integrate Pirsch into their own products to easily provide analytics to their clients. While the current API is powerful enough to support these use cases, the statistics API has become bloated and difficult to use. Mainly because each stat has its own endpoint. In the future, we will provide a cleaner and more unified experience.

Conclusion

Hope you had fun reading it! Thanks again to all of you who have helped make Pirsch what it is today. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!

Your Pirsch Team

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https://pirsch.io