Many visits to any website come from software, not people: search engines indexing pages, social networks fetching link previews, and tools that check your site is up. The plugin leaves these visits out of your stats, so your page views and opt-ins show real visitors.
There is nothing to set up. It is always on.
What is left out:
A visit is skipped when the visitor's browser does not identify itself at all, or when it identifies itself with any of these words:
- bot, crawl, spider or slurp (search engines such as Google and Bing)
- facebookexternalhit (Facebook fetching a link preview)
- preview and headless (preview tools and automated browsers)
- lighthouse (page speed tests)
- pingdom, uptime and monitor (uptime checkers)
- curl, wget and python-requests (scripts)
Where you see the effect:
The Dashboard, each funnel's stats cards and the opt-in counts on the Lists tab only count visits that pass this check. The Settings tab says so too: Page view stats exclude bots automatically.
What still works for bots:
Bots can still read your pages. Search engines can index your funnels and social networks can show your share image when a link is posted. They just do not add to your numbers.
A real example:
When Sam posts yoursite.com/free/EmailListBuildingChecklist/ on Facebook, Facebook visits the page to build the link preview with the funnel's share image. That visit is not counted, so the funnel's Page Views only go up when real people click.
Tips:
- Logged-in administrators are left out of the stats too. See Admin Tracking Exclusion.
- If your numbers still look high, see "Stats Seem Inflated / Too High".