Insights
Build your own saved charts and arrange them on a drag-and-drop dashboard.
The Pulse dashboard answers the questions everyone has. Insights is where you answer the ones only you have.
An insight is a saved chart you define: pick a metric, optionally break it down by a dimension, optionally filter it. It lives on a grid you arrange yourself. You get up to 12 insights per project.
The page controls
Every card on the page shares one range selector — Today · 7d · 30d · 90d · 12mo, default 30d. That’s deliberate. When you change the range, every card moves together, so you’re always comparing like-for-like instead of reading one card at 7d next to another at 90d and drawing a false conclusion.
There’s also a Local / UTC toggle, same as elsewhere in the app. It changes labels, not math.
Building an insight
| Control | Values and rules |
|---|---|
| Name | Required, max 60 characters |
| Metric | Visitors · Pageviews · Revenue · Event count |
| Event name | Only when the metric is Event count. Required. A dropdown of the top 20 event names actually seen in the last 30 days, with their counts |
| Breakdown | Leave empty for “Over time” (a time-series line chart), or pick one dimension for a top-10 horizontal bar chart |
| Filter | Optional. A dimension plus a value. Set both or neither. Value max 100 characters, matched case-insensitively |
| Advanced: limit to a URL path | Collapsible. A path prefix starting with /, max 512 characters. Matches as a prefix |
If you fill in half a filter, you get: “A filter needs both a dimension and a value.” Pick a dimension and type the value, or clear both.
The dimensions
Eleven dimensions are available, and the same list is used for both breakdowns and filters:
| Dimension | UI label |
|---|---|
browser | By browser |
os | By OS |
device | By device |
country | By country |
source | By source |
medium | By medium |
campaign | By campaign |
utm_source | By UTM source |
utm_medium | By UTM medium |
utm_campaign | By UTM campaign |
landing | By landing page (the session’s landing page) |
Recipes
The fastest way to learn the builder is to copy a few.
Visitors by country — Metric: Visitors. Breakdown: By country. A top-10 bar chart of where people come from.
Windows visitors over time — Metric: Visitors. Breakdown: Over time. Filter: By OS = Windows. A line chart of one slice of your traffic.
Signups from Google — Metric: Event count. Event: account_created. Filter: By source = google. Now you know whether that channel produces anything past the click.
Blog readers — Metric: Pageviews. Advanced → limit to a URL path: /blog. Everything under /blog counts, because the path matches as a prefix.
Revenue by campaign — Metric: Revenue. Breakdown: By UTM campaign. Only useful if you’re sending revenue.
The mistake everyone makes once
The “limit to a URL path” field takes a URL path — /blog, /pricing, /app/settings. It does not take a dimension value. Typing Windows or ES in there matches nothing, because no path on your site starts with Windows.
To narrow by a dimension value, use the Filter row instead: dimension By OS, value Windows. The path field is for “this section of my site”, the filter row is for “this kind of visitor”.
Arranging the dashboard
The grid is Grafana-style: 12 columns, cards you place yourself.
- Drag a card by its title bar to move it.
- Resize from the bottom-right corner.
- Cards auto-compact upward, so you never leave a hole in the middle of the page.
- The layout saves automatically on every drag and every resize. There is no save button — if you moved it, it’s saved.
- Below 768px the grid collapses to a single column and dragging is off. Arrange on a desktop, read on a phone.
Chart height follows card height, so making a card taller shows more of a bar breakdown. If a top-10 breakdown feels cramped, drag the bottom edge down.
Each card header carries a tag summarizing its config — the metric (or the event name) · the breakdown · the filter value — so you can tell two similar cards apart at a glance.
Editing and deleting
✎ Edit pre-fills the builder with that card’s settings and switches it into update mode, with Save changes and Cancel. Editing never moves the card: its position and size on the grid are preserved, so you can fix a filter without rebuilding your layout.
✕ Delete asks for confirmation first.
When you hit the ceiling you’ll see “Insight limit reached (12 per project).” Delete something you no longer read.
Behaviors worth knowing
Event aliases apply here. An Event count insight watching signup also counts every incoming name you’ve aliased to signup. If a number looks higher than the one raw event should produce, check your event aliases — that’s usually the reason, and usually the intended one.
Empty cards are a data problem, not a bug. The analytics store drops columns that are entirely empty for a project. So if your site has never sent UTM parameters, a “By UTM campaign” breakdown renders as an empty card — while every other card on the page keeps working normally. Same mechanism explains a Revenue insight sitting at 0: if you’ve never sent revenue, there’s nothing to read. Send the data, and the card fills in on its own.
Results are cached for about 60 seconds. A card won’t reflect an event you fired ten seconds ago. Wait a minute and reload before you go debugging your installation.
Where to go next
- Alerts — get told when a number moves, instead of checking
- Tracking events — how to send the events you want to chart
- Event aliases — merge messy event names into one
- Sources — the prebuilt version of the acquisition question