Web analytics
Contents
Web analytics gives you a simple dashboard of the numbers every website team looks at – visitors, pageviews, sessions, bounce rate, top pages, and where your traffic came from. It's built for people who really liked GA3, without the setup tax.
Because it runs on the same events as the rest of PostHog, a traffic number is never a dead end. Click through from a landing page to the session replays behind it, tie ad spend to conversions in marketing analytics, and let Self-driving watch each channel against its own baseline so an SEO drop or broken UTM tagging surfaces before it shows up in a monthly report.
Where you can use it
You read and explore your traffic in the PostHog web app. The other surfaces let you pull the same numbers into your editor, your own reports, and the fixes Self-driving opens.
PostHog Web
The dashboard, live traffic, conversion goals, and marketing analytics, with replays one click away.
Explore your traffic →PostHog MCP
Check traffic, diagnose marketing setup, and read heatmaps from any MCP client or AI editor.
Query traffic →PostHog Desktop Beta
Read the Self-driving reports built from traffic divergences, and decide what to do about them.
Review findings →API
Send traffic in, and pull visitors, sessions, and heatmap data into your own reports.
Use the API →PostHog also sends traffic out on a schedule: a weekly digest of visitors, pageviews, sessions, bounce rate, top pages, and traffic sources arrives by email and as an in-app notification, so the numbers reach you without anyone opening the dashboard.
Where its data comes from
Web analytics runs on the traffic your site already sends to PostHog. Pageviews and sessions come from the SDK, channels and campaigns are derived from each session's entry referrer and UTM tags, and marketing analytics adds cost data pulled from your ad platforms.
Sessions and pageviews
Every $pageview the SDK captures, grouped into sessions with entry paths, duration, and bounce.
Channels and campaigns
Channel type derived at ingestion from each session's entry referrer, UTM tags, and ad click IDs.
See channel types →Ad platform sources
Cost, clicks, and impressions synced from Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, and Bing ads.
Connect ad platforms →Bot and AI traffic
Crawlers, AI agents, and automation classified at query time so you can measure or exclude them.
Classify bot traffic →How web analytics works with Self-driving
Your traffic is a signal source for Self-driving. A scout compares each channel, entry path, and referrer against its own seasonality-matched baseline – not against a flat total – so a single segment stepping out of line becomes a report even when the site-wide number looks fine.
A traffic problem is rarely something a coding agent can fix. An SEO drop, a paused ad account, or a campaign missing its UTM tags lives in your site, your campaign tooling, or your marketing stack, not in a repository PostHog can open a pull request against. So these scouts stop at the report and route it to a human reviewer.
The two scouts that watch this data are acquisition and site health – channel divergence, attribution breakage, bounce and 404 steps – and web vitals regressions per page. Other signal sources, like error tracking, do open pull requests. See PostHog Desktop for what a report looks like, and the Self-driving docs for the full picture.