News

Introducing Pirsch 2.1

Pirsch 2.1 is the first major update since we launched 2.0. We've added new statistics, custom metrics, and a few convenience features.

Support for Client Hints

Let's start with some technical changes: we now support client hints. Client hints are a modern approach to identifying a visitor's operating system and browser, currently only supported in Chrome. They allow us to more reliably identify Chrome and OS versions, such as Windows 11 and Chrome OS, which weren't supported before.

If you use any of our SDKs or API, be sure to upgrade and set the new client hint fields for your requests.

Changes to the Dashboard

There are two minor changes to the dashboard in this release.

First, we have added a refresh button so that you no longer have to refresh the whole page to load the latest statistics.

On mobile, it is displayed in the graphs panel.

Second, by popular request, the panels now show direct/none and unknown for all stats. This was previously only available in the detail view when expanding a panel.

Conversion Rate Graph

The new conversion rate graph shows the conversion rate for a page, conversion goal, or event over time. This helps you identify trends.

Events for Conversion Goals

When creating a conversion goal, you can now enter an event name and a metadata key and value. The dashboard is filtered by the event and metadata pair. You can combine this with a path pattern or regular expression to filter for the page on which the event was triggered.

The path pattern is now optional, you only need to set one of the two to create a conversion goal.

Custom Metrics

Custom metrics are a new Pirsch Plus feature. They are a versatile tool to help you track various metrics for custom events and are part of the conversion goal dialog.

One example is e-commerce revenue and attribution tracking. Simply create a new conversion goal, specify the event you want to use to track revenue, and a metadata field you want to use to generate the stats. In the screenshot below, the field used to track revenue is called amount and the type is set to decimal.

When filtering by conversion goal, you'll see two new graphs for average and total revenue.

Of course, you can combine this with additional filters, such as the referrer or UTM parameters for ad attribution.

As with path patterns, you can set a target to receive a notification and optionally delete the goal automatically.

To create the Sale event, you would simply create an event as you're used to, with amount and currency as metadata fields.

pirsch("Sale", { meta: { currency: "EUR", amount: 199.98 } });

Custom metrics are not limited to e-commerce. You can use them for anything you want. Since they just use regular metadata fields, they are backward compatible and can be used on existing events.

As always, you can find our full changelog here.

Announcing Pirsch 2.1

Pirsch 2.1 is in its final testing phase! This will be the first point release since 2.0.

We will be rolling it out on the 17th of September, this Sunday. Expect a few minutes of downtime as we're also doing some maintenance on our infrastructure.

Check out our changelog here.

A Few Improvements to White Labeling

We've made a number of minor improvements to White Labeling, including:

• New options to hide the login button and footer on custom domains
• You can now select which color palette should be displayed by default (light or dark mode)
• Added a color switch for your customers/visitors on public dashboards

And a few other smaller things. Read the changelog.

Scripts on Custom Domains and Small Improvements

After the release of Pirsch 2.0 on Saturday, we fixed a lot of bugs thanks to your feedback.

This release includes an improvement to the color picker for custom themes and scripts on custom domains.

Scripts on Custom Domains

It's now possible to serve all scripts on your own domain. After configuring a custom domain, you can copy the snippets from the integration settings page. We've shortened the file names, so that they won't be blocked.

• pirsch.js becomes p.js
• pirsch-events.js becomes e.js
• pirsch-sessions.js becomes s.js
• pirsch-extended.js becomes ext.js

Better Color Picker

The color picker for custom themes used the browser default, which is inconsistent across browser vendors and in some cases doesn't allow you to insert hex codes and freely select a color.

We added a custom color picker that unifies the experience across all browsers and supports all formats supported by our dashboard.

Introducing Pirsch 2.0

Today we are releasing Pirsch 2.0, with new exciting features, improvements and a foundation for future development! Without further ado, let's start with the changes.

User Interface Improvements

We've made a number of major and minor improvements to the dashboard. Most notably, the top navigation is now cleaner and easier to read. It also makes more room for new features (more on that later).

The new overview lets you see some basic statistics for all of your sites and easily switch between them. It also shows the number of members and lets you know if you're the owner of a dashboard. The statistics on the dashboard are cached and not updated in real time.

Another notable change is the new integration overview after creating a dashboard and in the settings. There was some confusion about when to use which integration. The new collapsible sections make it easier to see your options and choose the right one.

One feature that has been requested for a while now is a full-width dashboard. And guess what. We added one.

Organizations

Our first Pirsch Plus feature in this release! Organizations help you manage sites, themes, your team, and your clients.

You can add team members and customers to an organization and manage their permissions. They get access to every dashboard that belongs to the organization, so you can make changes to permissions centrally. Previously, you had to sign in with the account that the subscription was created for. Now you can simply have your team member add sites on your behalf.

Themes are made available to your team members. Speaking of themes...

Themes and White Labeling

Probably the most anticipated addition for many of you are themes and custom domains! This allows you to fully white label the experience for you and your clients. White labeling is available with Pirsch Plus.

Create themes for yourself or your organization and assign them to dashboards. You can change the logo, favicon, color, border radius and more! Setting a theme also affects emails.

A theme sets the default look for your dashboards, but you can override individual settings on the new Theme Settings page.

To fully white label Pirsch, add a custom domain to your dashboard. We will automatically request an SSL certificate for your domain and host the dashboard on it. All features are accessible through your domain, so customers can sign in, reset their password, and more, all from your domain.

The only exception (for now) are our scripts. Integrations will still need to load scripts and make requests to pirsch.io.

If you don't want to upgrade to Pirsch Plus, you can try out themes by applying a temporary set of rules on the Themes Settings page.

Pirsch Plus

Pirsch Plus is our new pricing tier for more advanced features, such as white labeling, but also for future additions. We called it "Plus" because you don't lose anything if you're on our Standard plan, but it will help you get more value out of Pirsch.

For an overview of what you'll gain by upgrading to Pirsch Plus, please see our pricing page. You can upgrade your subscription on the Billing page.

There are two minor changes for new users:

• With the Standard plan, you're limited to 50 dashboards. This is far more than most people need, so we feel this limit is reasonable. If you're an existing customer, you still have unlimited sites.
• Free trails will now start after the first website is added. This means that new users can start their trial whenever they want, without the pressure to use the free trial right after signing up.

Pirsch Enterprise

We now officially offer an enterprise version of Pirsch. You can either host Pirsch yourself or get a custom setup for your needs. Please contact us if you're interested.

Other Changes

Under the hood, we have made many technical improvements that are (hopefully) not visible to you. For example, we completely rewrote the dashboard state management. You can check our changelog for details.

If you find any problems, please don't hesitate to contact our support. We usually respond quickly and try to fix bugs the same day.

What's next?

Pirsch 2.0 is the foundation for many more features. Here are some of the things we have planned for the near future:

• Monetary values for custom events
• Easy segmentation of page views by tags
• A comparison view
• Website monitoring
• Funnels

We hope you like what we have done in this release! Feel free to share your feedback with us via email or social media.

Your Pirsch Team

Pirsch 2.0 Announcement

We've been busy building Pirsch 2.0 for the past few months and are finally ready to announce a release date!

Pirsch 2.0 will be rolled out on the 8th of July. You should expect a downtime of a few hours as we're also improving our infrastructure.

More details will be presented on launch. For the meantime, you can check out our changelog here.

Euro Payments and New Payment Methods Available

If you had problems with credit card payments in the past, you can now pay using PayPal or SEPA. We have also included the possibility to change to Euro on the billing page.

Go to Billing Page

New Google Analytics Import

Until today, we were transforming the data imported from Google Analytics into our own format, which led to inconsistencies between the two dashboards. It also gave the impression that you could filter on the imported statistics, which is not possible as Google does not provide raw data and we rely on aggregated statistics.

We have decided to change our approach and the imported stats are now stored as-is. This means that if the statistics displayed on the dashboard contain imported data, you will no longer be able to filter on them.

Please also note that since we are storing one data point per day, there will be differences in totals. For example, the total number of visitors will be different if you filter by time period. Looking at days individually will be accurate.

We strongly recommend that you re-import your statistics. Please delete your existing imported data on the Danger Zone settings page first. Make sure you don't accidentally delete more than you want! You can then re-import your statistics as you've done before.

More information can be found in our documentation.

This is a small update adding a feature that has been requested for a while now: changing the domain for a dashboard. The new feature can be found in the settings (danger zone).

We also fixed a bug regarding events. Before, creating an event would start a new session with the page view count at one if required. This led to some smaller inconsistencies as no page view was recorded. The counter will now start at zero, fixing the inconsistency.

Using custom events on your website has become a lot easier. We added a new script allowing you to:

• Create custom events using HTML attributes and CSS classes (useful in situations in which you don't have access to scripting)
• Automatic outbound link tracking
• Automatic file download tracking
• Tracking 404 error pages

To use these features, replace the pirsch.js script with the pirsch-extended.js script. Note that outbound links, file downloads, and 404 error pages are tracked as custom events, which count towards your monthly page view limit. More information can be found in our documentation. You can also find a demo on GitHub.

We also started working on what will become Pirsch 2.0. The basis for a lot of new features we have panned for the future. For the first iteration, we plan to add support for team management, theme settings, and custom domains.

We updated our DPA (Data Processing Agreement). You can always download the latest version from the resources menu or by clicking here.

We now have an affiliate program!

Our affiliate program allows you to earn rewards for referring new customers to Pirsch. You can simply copy your personal affiliate link, and every time someone signs up for a subscription, a reward is added to your account balance.

Simply navigate to the affiliate page from the account menu in the top-right corner and copy your personal link.

Learn more

We've been busy over the holidays and worked on the next major update for Pirsch. The new version brings some convenient functions and improvements to the dashboard.

Changes to the Settings

The settings pages have been restructured, as they got bloated.

We added locks, allowing you to prevent accidentally changing or deleting something on the web interface or through the API. Locked elements can only be unlocked manually on the settings page.

The panels on the dashboard can now be customized. You can set whether a panel should be displayed on the private, public, or both dashboards. By default, all panels are enabled.

Viewer Time Zone

We now use the viewer's time zone by default. Before, you would always see the dashboard in the configured time zone. This is now used as a fallback if the visitor has no time zone configured.

Other Improvements

We made a few subtle improvements to the dashboard. Most importantly, we improved the authentication so that you can now stay logged in for a year in a secure way.

The subdomain if you add a dashboard will now be pre-filled, and we improved the data fetching mechanism so that pending requests are now cancelled if you change the filters while panels might be still loading.

Changelog

Today we have released an update, including the new version of our open-source core. This will bring event filters more in line with other filters, improve bot filtering, and fix an issue with our session extension feature.

Improved Bot Filter

We now filter bots based on their IP address. This will greatly improve the quality of your data and reduce costs. We block all larger known data centers and servers that are known as spammers.

You don't need to worry if you use our API to send statistics. The filter mechanism won't affect your own servers running in the cloud or on-premise.

Excluding Events

Before, excluding an event would only return statistics for visitors that created any event at all. Now, it correctly returns all visitors without the event and no event at all.

In addition, filtering for an event will now return all pages a visitor visited during a session. We have added a new entry in the page view panel Event Pages that shows the pages an event has been triggered on.

Extending Sessions

We have fixed an issue with our session extension feature. Sessions are reset after 30 minutes if the visitor doesn't switch pages. You can now extend sessions using a new script or our API. This is useful if you would like to see how many people are on your site, even if they don't swap pages, like in an app, for instance.

Please note that extending sessions comes at an additional cost. One session extension will be counted as 1/10th of a regular page view. If you update a session once a minute, keeping it alive for 10 minutes will be counted as one page view.

UTM Content and Terms

We have moved the UTM Content and Terms panels. If you filter for an UTM parameter (sources, media, or campaigns), they will now show up in the sources panel.

Support

We noticed that a few users had trouble finding a support channel. So we have added a new entry to the resources menu.

Changelog

This update includes improvements to the filters. Before, parameters of the same type (like path, country, etc.) were connected using a logical OR. This meant that if you wanted to exclude multiple pages, for example, the filter would do nothing. We've changed this so that negated parameters ("is not") are now connected using a logical AND.

Here is an example: Before, the filter could be read as "Path is not / OR Path is not /about-us", which had no effect. Now it can be read as "Path is not / AND Path is not /about-us", correctly excluding both pages.

Changelog

This version adds some convenience features. You can now:

• configure the time visitors are counted as active on the dashboard configuration page
• display the number of active visitors in the tab from the account settings page
• configure advanced options and test the JavaScript snippet from the dashboard configuration

Check out our changelog for a list of all changes.

We're proud to announce the next big update to Pirsch! Let's go through the new features and changes one by one.

New Filters

The filters have been completely reworked and now allow you to set multiple values for the same field.

The contains selector filters results based on your input.

You can click on a value to change it and filter the options by typing, all controllable by keyboard!

Use the arrow keys to navigate results, press enter to select a value, or press escape to close the selection.

Views

You can now save a set of filters as views for later use. Share views with your team to gain insights that are important for you more quickly.

A view can be created by clicking the bookmark icon in the filter bar.

Import Data From Google Analytics

We have made switching from Google Universal Analytics to Pirsch a lot easier. You can now import your statistics on the general settings page.

Please note that we cannot fully reassemble the statistics that you see in Google Analytics and that there will be differences, especially when you use filters.

Set a Dashboard as Favorite

We've finally added a features that has been requested a few times: setting a dashboard as favorite.

By clicking the star icon you can set a dashboard that will be loaded by default after login.

... and more

Of course we made a lot more changes and fixed bugs. One important change is that the entry and exit pages now show the unique visitor count instead of the number of sessions, to align it with the other panels. Also, the percentage now show the relative visitor count compared to all visitors, just like for regular pages.

Check out our changelog for a list of all changes.

This is a smaller update including one important change if you are a user of our API.

The CF-Connecting-IP, X-Forwarded-For, Forwarded, and X-Real-IP headers have been removed from the API. This means if you rely on these headers, you need to update your integration and set the IP field for the request to the real visitor IP.

How you obtain the real visitor IP depends on your setup. If you are behind a proxy, load balancer, or in the cloud, look up your provider documentation to see which of the above headers contains the real IP address.

We know that this change comes a bit abruptly, but the IP was easily spoofable and most Pirsch users shouldn't be affected by this change, so we decided to roll it out quickly.

Check out our changelog for details.

Version 1.15 is a huge update with a lot of new features and improvements. Here is what is new!

Multi-Domain Support

Pirsch now has multi-domain support, allowing you to create rollup views and send data from a single website to multiple dashboards. To enable this, open the developer settings and add the domains you would like to send data to or receive from.

On your website, add a comma-separated list of domains to your JavaScript snippet using the data-domain attribute or use the API.

Keyboard Shortcuts

We have added keyboard shortcuts to make it easier and quicker to navigate your statistics. Press the left and right arrow keys to change the current period. Single keys are used to change the filter.

Access Tokens

Sending page views and events using the API requires requesting an access token using oAuth. We now offer write-only access tokens that don't require an additional step and are better suited for stateless programming languages where you can't store the oAuth token between requests, like PHP.

To generate an access token, navigate to the developer settings and click "Add Client". Change the type to "Access token".

Multiple Email Reports

You can now add multiple email reports for the same email address. This is useful if you would like to receive a weekly and a monthly report, for example.

Hide the Graphs

The graphs can now be hidden to reduce the space they take up.

Filter and Sort All Data

Tables are now filtered and sorted on the server, so you are no longer limited to the top 100 results.

We also added pagination to allow you to load more results.

Improvements

We made a bunch of improvements, including:

• conversion goals and events can now be created from the panel and are always visible
• added 25% separators in panel lines
• the chart labels are now responsive

As always, check out our changelog for a full list of changes. We will update our documentation in the coming days to include instructions and more details for all the new features.

This is a smaller update mostly fixing bugs, but it also changes the growth calculation when viewing a single day.

Filtering for a day will now compare it to the same day the week before, instead of the previous day. "Today" will take the time of day into account.

You can view the full changelog here.

It's time for an update! The latest major version of Pirsch brings a lot of new features, fixes, and improvements. These are the most significant changes:

• you can now click on the graph to filter for a date
• results can now be grouped by week, month, and year, in addition to the regular per-day view
• calculating the growth for the "Today" filter will now take the time into account instead of comparing to the whole last day
• we have improved bot filtering using simple heuristics
• the JavaScript integration now has an option to filter pages using a regular expression
• the email report has been improved
• the sample for conversion goals when using a regular expression is now saved and the dialog has been overall improved
• the domain deletion dialog now contains the hostname for easy copy and paste

To see all the changes, please visit our changelog.

This is our second feature update this year, adding new features to the dashboard and usability improvements.

For a better use of space, the height of the main graph has been reduced.

You can now filter for the last month or for the current month up until today. Clicking on one of the newly added arrows will move the selection to the previous or next interval.

We have merged the platform and screen size statistics with the operating system and browser panel. This will reduce scrolling and make the dashboard more compact.

The cities panel now also includes the country's flag to make it easier to see what country a city is located in.

Using our conversion goal feature, you can now add your own regular expression. You can test your expression against an input. The syntax needs to be compatible with RE2 (an error will be displayed if your regex can't be compiled).

We made more improvements to the core and our backend. For details, check out our changelog.

We've released a smaller feature update, adding hourly page views, sessions, and bounce rate.

Since our last larger update in December, we've also fixed a whole bunch of issues. Most significantly, the average session duration was calculated incorrectly. Check out our changelog for more details.

When we launched Pirsch last year, we set a lower price tag because we felt our feature set was too small. This has now changed and we did make adjustments to our pricing. Here are the changes for our three most used plans:

• 10k page views: $48 -> $60 annually
• 100k page views: $96 -> $120 annually
• 200k page views: $144 -> $180 annually

The monthly pricing for these plans will stay the same. Existing subscriptions will be updated with the next billing cycle.

For all updated prices, please refer to our pricing page.

The year is almost over, and we would like to thank everyone who supported us. You can find a recap of 2021 in the article linked below, including our plans for 2022 and changes to our pricing.

Our Recap of 2021

This month's update brings some behavior changes and a new way to access the API:

• events can now be filtered by entry and exit pages (and the other way around)
• popular referrers are now grouped (google.com and google.de will both be displayed as Google for example)
• OS version numbers are now shortened to reduce clutter (10.11.5 will now be displayed as 10.11)
• sessions will now be reset when the referrer or a UTM parameter changes and no longer count as bounced if an event is send
• we have added a new API endpoint to list all events including metadata and filter by metadata keys and values

The API can now be accessed by creating a "user client" on the account page (click on your name in the top right corner). A client created that way has access to all of your domains and more functions, like creating, deleting, and modifying domains and their settings. In the coming days, we will add more details and descriptions of the new endpoints available on our documentation.

As always, to see all changes you can view our changelog.

It has been about a month since our last product update. This updates contains usability and dashboard improvements, bugfixes, and new features. We also have a special offer at the end for you!

Let's start with the usability and dashboard improvements:

• we added a search to the domain selection
• the light/dark mode preferences will now automatically be detected (set to "auto" in the account settings)
• the account timezone settings have been removed. Instead, the timezone is now automatically pre-selected when adding a website
• we added links to your public dashboard to the settings page, if configured

The following new features are now available:

• you can now set the time range filter to "live", to automatically update the dashboard statistics every 30 seconds and load statistics for the past 10 minutes
• we added a parameter to hide the menu and footer (add ui=none to the URL) for embedded dashboards

Finally, we teamed up with Dailytics for beautiful and customizable email reports! You can get 50% off for the first two months by using the code PIRSCH50.

As always, to see all changes you can view our changelog.

We are live on ProductHunt! Feel free to leave us an upvote and a review.

In our latest major update, we made significant changes to the core functionality of Pirsch, improving the performance, the acurary of statistics, and added more filters.

The most fundamental change is that we now roll forward sessions. Data points like the referrer, collected on the first visit, are now available on all successive page views, allowing you to analyze the full visitor journey and see where someone originally came from on any page he visits. Events are also now connected to sessions and allow more granular filtering.

If you would like to learn more about the technical changes, please refer to our changelog.

Here is a list of changes we made to the dashboard:

• referrers are now grouped by hostname (if possible). Filtering for a referrer will reveal the full list of links visitors came from
• statistics can now be filtered by the entry and exit page, in addition to the regular page filter
• the entry and exit page panels now include the entry and exit rates
• filtering for a country now displays a city panel
• statistics can now be filtered by "unknown" and are displayed as "null" in the filter list (e.g. "Referrer is null")
• tabs in panels are no longer reset to the first tab if you change the filter

We also extended the free-trial period to 30 days and 100,000 requests.

This weeks update contains performance improvements and filter inversion.

A filter can be inverted by clicking on the green "is". Click on "is not" to change it back.

Additionally, we made the following changes:

• pirsch.js and pirsch-event.js are now gzip compressed
• we added a Dashboard button to the menu, which does the same as clicking on the logo. In a future update, clicking on the logo will bring you to an overview of all dashboards
• we fixed filtering by "unknown" statistics (when opening a panel)

View our changelog

In this smaller update, we have added new screen classes and made some optimizations.

• new screen classes are HD, Full HD, WQHD, UHD 4K, and UHD 5K for higher resolution screens
• the XXL class has been renamed to Full HD (< 1920px)
• devices with zero visitors are no longer displayed on the platform panel
• we added the defer attribute to our script snippets, we recommend that you add it to your websites

Here is a short example how the defer attribute can be added to the snippet. It will delay the execution of the script after the page has fully loaded and will speed up your page (at least a little bit).

<script defer src="..." ... />

View our changelog

This updates brings a lot of changes, improvements, and bug fixes to Pirsch. Most significantly, we now collect the page title and you can group page statistics by them instead of the path. This is useful if you dynamically generate pages, like /page?id=123.

The option for this feature is turned off by default and can be enabled on the domains general settings page.

Furthermore, numbers are now shortened. You can hover any number, time, or percantage to show the raw value.

Tables can now be searched. Entering a search query will filter the results by the first column.

Flags are now displayed in the country panel and table.

Finally, the dashboard URL is now more descriptive. The selected interval will be shown in a more readable format (today, yesterday, 7d, ...) and we added the domain, so that the correct one is selected if you send someone the link.

And of course, we fixed all known bugs.

View our changelog

Welcome to the news! This new dialog will show you the latest additions and changes to Pirsch.

You can now use "Yesterday" to filter the statistics for the past day.

Additionally, we made the following changes:

• visual and textual improvements to the website and settings
• this dialog has been added to show you what has changed since the last update!
• some minor issues have been fixed

View our changelog