Get the Monday Plausible report written, not screenshotted

Turn four Plausible numbers into a written report

The four numbers are four calls.

What eats the twenty minutes is the sentence underneath each one. A companion runs the breakdown, spots the Thursday referrer, opens it on the live web, finds the newsletter that linked you, and writes the sentence with the link attached so the claim is checkable.

Filters use the Stats API v2 structured array form, so “visitors from Germany on the pricing page over the last 28 days” is one query rather than three clicks and a mental subtraction. What comes back is data rather than a picture, so it goes straight into the doc, the sheet or the marketing update.

Why does site metadata need a second key?

Because Plausible splits its API in two.

The Stats API key answers everything about traffic. A separate Sites API key answers everything about configuration: listing sites, reading a site’s tracker settings, listing goals, listing custom properties and listing teams.

The connection format is explicit about it: the stats key, then optionally the sites key, then optionally a base URL. That base URL makes this the one integration in the batch that talks to a server you run yourself. On the hosted product with only traffic questions, one key is enough.

What can a companion read in Plausible?

Everything reporting-shaped: aggregates, timeseries, breakdowns, realtime, and site metadata with the second key. Nothing creates a site, provisions one for a team, adds a goal, defines a custom property, invites a user, rotates a shared link or imports data.

Goals and properties get configured in Plausible once, by a person. From then on this is how the numbers reach the document every Monday.

• Traffic: aggregate, timeseries, breakdown, general query, realtime visitors.
• Metadata, with a Sites API key: teams, sites, one site’s settings, goals, custom properties.
• Filters, dimensions, paging and imported data all run through the query tools.
• No write of any kind exists: not a site, a goal, a property, a user or a shared link.

Find out why that page converted

Why did that page convert.

What changed on it last Tuesday. Which campaign the traffic actually came from, and whether any of it is worth a slide. A companion answers those by reading the site, the campaign tool and the document in one session and writing the summary.

Doing it every Monday is operations with a report attached, and pulling six months of breakdowns into one sheet is data extraction. Plausible ships no assistant of its own, as of this writing, so the written weekly report is the part that happens here.

Frequently asked questions