Guide › Read your analytics

Read your analytics

Most analytics screens are decoration. These numbers are worth ten minutes a month because each one tells you to do something specific.

Where to find them

Sign in and you land on your analytics. Everything defaults to the last 30 days, and each headline figure is shown against the 30 days before it, so you can see which way it is moving rather than just where it is.

The headline numbers

Conversations

How many people talked to it. On its own this only tells you whether the widget is working — its value is the direction. A sudden drop to zero almost always means the snippet came off your site during a redesign, not that nobody visited.

Leads

How many left their contact details. This is the number the chatbot is actually paid to produce.

Conversion rate

Leads as a share of conversations. Worth watching, but do not chase it upwards for its own sake — a chatbot that answers a quick question well and lets someone go without their email has still done its job. A rate that falls while conversations rise usually means new visitors are asking something it cannot answer.

Engaged conversations

Chats that went beyond a message or two. Someone who asked one thing and left was browsing; someone who went back and forth six times was deciding. When this figure climbs, the chatbot is holding real conversations rather than deflecting.

Average messages, average length

How long a typical conversation runs. Very short across the board usually means it is answering too thinly or missing the facts people need. Very long can mean the same thing from the other direction — people repeating themselves because they are not getting an answer.

The ones that change what you do

Where chats start

Which pages of your website people are on when they open the chat. This is the most useful report on the screen and almost nobody looks at it.

If one page produces far more conversations than the rest, that page is not answering something obvious. Fix the page and you get the enquiry and a better website. If your pricing page produces the most chats, your pricing page is not clear enough.

When people turn up

The hours and days your visitors actually appear, and your busiest single slot. Almost every small business is surprised by this: it is rarely Tuesday at 10am.

After hours

The share of conversations that happened outside your working hours. This is the number that tells you what the chatbot is worth to you, because those are the enquiries that had nowhere else to go.

If a third of your conversations happen after you close, a third of your enquiries used to hit an empty contact form and a hopeful wait. That is the return, stated plainly.

Phone or desktop

Mostly phones, for almost everyone. Worth knowing when you are deciding how much effort to put into how your website looks on a big monitor.

Where they are

Roughly where your visitors are. Useful for two things: noticing demand from somewhere you do not currently cover, and noticing that half your traffic is from somewhere you will never sell to — which changes how you read every other number on the page.

What to actually do, once a month

1. Look at the direction, not the number

   Each headline shows the previous period next to it. Up, down or flat is the information; the absolute figure mostly reflects how busy your website is.

2. Open the top page that starts chats

   Read it as a stranger. Whatever it fails to say is what people are asking.

3. Read five transcripts from your busiest hour

   That is your typical customer, at your typical moment. It is the most representative sample you will get.

4. Fix one thing

   One missing fact in the knowledge base, or one unclear paragraph on your website. One a month compounds; a list of twenty does not get done.

What the numbers exclude

Conversations we screened out as sales pitches are not counted as chats or as leads. That keeps your conversion rate honest — an SEO agency pitching you is not a customer who failed to convert. How screening works.