Insights turns your web chat widget into a complete visitor-analytics tool. In one place you get the big picture — how many people visit, which pages they read, where they come from, and how many turn into chats — and a real-time view of who is on your site right now, with the option to start the conversation first.
Insights is available on the Pro and Ultimate plans and works through the web chat widget. Every number is first-party: it comes from your own site, through your own widget — no third-party trackers and no cookies.
Before you start
- Your plan must include this feature (Pro or Ultimate).
- The web chat widget must be installed on your site — see Setting Up the Web Chat Widget. Pages are counted wherever the widget script loads, even if the visitor never opens the chat.
Opening Insights
Click Insights in the left sidebar and pick the project next to the page title. There are three tabs:
- Overview — the analytics dashboard: trends, top pages, sources, locations and devices over any date range.
- Live — everyone on your site at this moment, with proactive chat invites.
- Performance — response and resolution times for your team. Free on every plan, so it stays available even without Insights.
Overview: your visitor analytics
Choose a date range at the top — Today, Yesterday, the last 7 or 30 days, this or last month, the last 12 months, or a custom range — and, if you like, a time granularity (hourly, daily, weekly or monthly). Everything below updates to that window.
Key numbers. A row of cards shows Unique visitors, Visits, Pageviews, Views per visit, Bounce rate, Average visit duration, Chats started and Chat conversion — each with the change versus the previous period. Click a card to plot that metric on the graph.
Trend graph. The chart plots your chosen metric over time. The current, still-in-progress period is drawn as a dotted line, so a partial day never looks like a real drop.
Breakdowns. Ranked lists show where your traffic goes and where it comes from:
- Pages — your most-visited pages, plus Entry (where visits begin) and Exit (where visits end) tabs.
- Sources — how people arrive: direct, search, social or a referring site, with a Campaigns tab for your UTM-tagged links and a Paid tab that groups visits by the ad platform whose click brought them — Google Ads, Meta Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok, Yandex, LinkedIn, X, Reddit or Snapchat — recognised from the click identifier in the landing URL (gclid, fbclid, msclkid and so on) or from a paid utm_medium such as cpc.
- Locations — countries, with a drill-down to regions and cities.
- Devices — device type, browser and operating system.
Filter anything. Click any value — a page, a country, a source — to filter the whole dashboard to that slice. Filters stack, and the filtered view has its own web address you can bookmark or share with your team. Use Export CSV to download the current trend.
Conversion goals
Insights can also measure conversions — visits that end in a result you care about: a completed sign-up, an order confirmation, a started chat. Define page-visit (URL) and custom-event goals, see completions and conversion rate per goal, and click the built-in Started chat goal to compare how visitors who talk to you convert versus everyone else. No Google products required. Full guide with step-by-step instructions and examples: Conversion goals: track sign-ups, orders and chats.
Live: who is on the site right now
The Live tab has two views, switched with the Live | Recent toggle at the top. Live lists everyone currently on your site. Each row shows the visitor's name (the contact's name — click it in the detail panel to rename the visitor, or rename the contact in the inbox; either way the name follows them everywhere, and a name you set is never overwritten by what the visitor later types into the pre-chat form), the page they are viewing, how long they have been on the site and how many times they have visited. You can search by page, name or country, and the chip row under the search box narrows the list: online now, in chat, returning, new, identified (has a name), traffic source, country — and Hide me, which removes your own browser from the list. Status badges:
- Online / Idle — Online means active within the last minute or so; after a few quiet minutes the visitor switches to Idle and then drops off the list.
- New / Returning — whether this visitor has been on your site before. A returning visitor has more than one visit, the same definition the Overview tab uses (a new visit starts after 30 minutes of inactivity).
- In chat — the visitor currently has an open conversation.
Click a visitor to open the detail panel:
- Pages — the current page plus the page history of this visit.
- Location & network — country (plus city and network provider where available) and IP address.
- Device & source — browser, operating system, the referrer that brought them, and campaign (UTM) tags.
- Activity — first seen, last seen, the current visit's duration and page count, and the total number of visits.
- Conversations — the visitor's open and past conversations with your team.
Recent: who was here earlier
Nobody is deleted when they leave the Live list. Switch to Recent to see everyone who was on your site in the last 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days — one row per visitor, most recently active first, with the last page they viewed, how long that visit lasted and how many pages it covered, their traffic source, country and total number of visits. The same chips filter this view, and a visitor who is on the site right now still shows a green dot. Click a row to open the same detail panel. A visitor who has already left cannot be invited to chat — an invite only reaches someone who is on the site now — so the panel says so and lists their conversations instead.
Starting the chat first
- Select a visitor on the Live tab.
- Type a short greeting in the invite box. Something concrete works best — for example: “Hi! I see you're on the pricing page — happy to help you pick a plan.” Two helpers sit under the box: Presets inserts one of your canned replies, and Draft with AI writes a short opener from the page the visitor is on, in their language — once there is text in the box the same button becomes Improve with AI and polishes your draft instead. The AI never invents prices or availability and never promises a follow-up; each use costs one AI call from the project balance, like the other assist tools.
- Click Invite to chat.
On the visitor's screen the chat widget opens automatically with your message. On your side Chatonio creates a conversation and assigns it to you, so you are ready when the reply arrives. If the visitor already has an open conversation, the panel shows Open chat instead — click it to jump into the existing thread. If the visitor doesn't answer, nothing else happens — the invite is a single widget message, with no follow-ups and no emails.
What the numbers mean
- Visit (session) — one continuous browsing session; a new visit starts after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- Unique visitors — distinct people, recognised by a first-party identifier in their own browser.
- Bounce rate — the share of visits that viewed a single page and then left.
- Exit rate (per page) — how often a page was the last one in a visit.
- Views per visit and visit duration — how deep and how long the average visit is.
- Chats started / chat conversion — how many visits turned into a conversation, and the percentage — so you can see which pages and campaigns actually drive chats.
- New vs returning — whether the browser has visited your site before.
Privacy and accuracy
- First-party and cookieless. All data comes from your own website through the widget, using a first-party identifier stored in the visitor's own browser and scoped to your site — no third-party cookies, and no tracking across other sites or ad networks.
- No raw IP is stored. A visitor's IP address is used only to estimate location and is never saved with the analytics — only the country, and where available the region and city.
- Returning-visitor detection relies on that browser identifier; if the visitor clears their browser data, they appear as new again.
- Location is an estimate derived from the network connection — treat city-level data as approximate.
- Bots are filtered before anything is counted, so both the live list and the analytics reflect real people.
- History. Trends are available for roughly the last year; detailed page-level data is kept for about 90 days.
Track exact landing URLs (full page addresses)
By default, Insights groups pages by their path, so a visitor who lands on /pricing?plan=pro and one who lands on /pricing?plan=team both count under /pricing. If you want to see the exact address a visitor was on — everything after the ?, known as the query string — open the web-chat channel’s settings, expand URLs & domains and then its Advanced settings, and turn on Record the full URL (with query string). It is off by default.
Once it’s on, a new URLs tab appears in the Pages panel, listing the full addresses your visitors were on — for example /en/?from=BTC&to=ETH or /signup?utm_campaign=spring. Click any URL to filter the whole dashboard by it, or open View all to search the complete list. This is useful when one page shows very different content depending on its query string: product filters, campaign landing pages, exchange directions and so on. Top Pages stays query-free so your page list doesn’t get noisy.
Sensitive values — tokens, passwords, session identifiers and the like — are always stripped from the address before it is stored, on every plan.
Attribution parameters. Separately from full-URL capture, Insights always records the campaign tags and ad click identifiers from the address a visitor lands on — the utm_* tags, plus gclid, fbclid, msclkid, ttclid and the other platforms' click IDs. They feed the Paid tab and show on a visitor's card as a Source › Medium › Campaign trail, with the rest behind a +N more link. If your links carry your own parameters — a partner code in ref, say — list their names in Extra URL parameters to record, in the same Advanced settings block, and they are kept too. Up to ten names; anything that looks like a credential is refused even if listed.
I don't see any data
- Check that the widget is installed and loading on the pages in question — pages are only counted where the widget script runs.
- Check the plan: Insights shows an upgrade notice when the project owner's plan doesn't include the feature.
- The Overview builds up over time — a project that has just added the widget will fill in as visitors arrive. The Live tab shows only people who are on the site at this moment, and a brand-new visitor can take a few seconds to appear.