Analytics

Vantage SEO has a small first-party counter for page views and 404 hits. This page tells you how to turn it on, what it writes into your pages, and what it records.

Vantage SEO does not add Google Analytics 4, Matomo, Umami or Microsoft Clarity code to your pages. It has no settings for these services. Its counter sends data only to your own site.

Turn the counter on

  1. Open SEO Settings, General tab. You can also use step 5 of the setup wizard.
  2. Under Analytics, turn on First-party page-view counts.
  3. Save.
  4. Publish the site. Pages start to count only after the next publish.

The counter is off by default. To turn it off, clear the same switch, save and publish again.

What the plugin writes into your pages

The tracker script file

Instatic adds the plugin's script file tracker.js to the end of the body of every published page. The file is part of the plugin zip. Instatic serves it from your own site, from the plugin's asset folder. Instatic adds this file on every page, also when the counter is off. When the counter is off, the script stops at once and sends nothing.

The configuration tag

When the counter is on, the plugin adds a small inline script to the SEO block in the <head>. The script sets window.__mwSeoAnalytics to three values: the beacon address, a site id and enabled: true.

Instatic pages have a Content Security Policy. The policy blocks inline scripts that it does not know. The plugin therefore adds the SHA-256 hash of this inline script to the script-src of the page policy. If the plugin cannot read the policy, it does not add the inline script, and the page does not count.

What a visit sends

When a page loads, the script sends one small request to your own site:

POST /admin/api/cms/plugins/monkeywebs.seo/runtime/beacon

On your 404 page, the script sends the request to …/runtime/beacon404 instead. The request body contains:

FieldContent
Page pathThe path of the page only. The query string never leaves the page.
ReferrerThe origin of the referring site, for example https://example.com. The script sends it only when the visitor came from a different site.
Screen sizeOne letter: mobile, tablet or desktop.
Site idThe site id from the configuration tag.

Visits the script does not count

The script sends nothing when the browser has Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control turned on. It also sends nothing when an automated browser loads the page.

What the plugin stores

  • One record per day for page views and one record per day for 404 hits.
  • Each record holds a count for each path and a total for the day.
  • Up to 500 paths per day for page views and 200 paths per day for 404 hits. More paths go into one "other" bucket.
  • Records older than 30 days are deleted.

The plugin uses no cookies and no visitor ids. It does not store IP addresses. The counts are approximate: if the plugin restarts, it can lose up to 15 minutes of counts that it did not save yet.

Where to see the counts

  • Free The SEO traffic widget on the Instatic dashboard shows the page views and the 404 hits for the last 7 days. When the counter is off but old counts exist, the widget says that analytics is paused.
  • Pro The Redirects tab lists the 404 paths with their counts, and the MCP tool seo_get_404_log returns them.

Limits

  • A page that you published with the counter on keeps counting until you publish it again with the counter off. The plugin ignores these counts after you turn the counter off.
  • The beacon routes accept about 300 page-view requests and 120 404 requests per minute. The plugin drops requests above these limits.
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