Analytics
Analytics can be found on your dashboard. This shows all of the human-reads your posts and pages have received. Reads are only counted if a reader has hovered or scrolled on the post. This weeds out bots and scrapers which generally don't perform either of these actions.
Reads vs Unique visitors
Reads refer to unique reads (unique post and reader), whereas unique visitors is the number of people who have been on your site, regardless of how many posts they have read. Bear analytics is slightly different from other tools in that we don't track more than one view per post per reader per day, since if someone reloads the page a bunch we wouldn't want this counting as multiple reads.
RSS subscribers
This is a rough approximation of the number of people who are subscribed to your RSS feed. This is calculated by determining the unique number of IP address requests to the RSS feed in a 24 hour period (as RSS readers can be set to poll anywhere from every 5 minutes, to every 24 hours). This isn't perfect, since 2 people sharing an IP address would be counted as 1, and 1 person who changes IP address in a given 24 hours period would be logged as 2. So take this number with a grain of salt.
In-depth analytics
The basic version of the analytics only shows the number of reads and unique visitors in the past week. In order to gain access to in-depth analytics the blog will need to be upgraded.
This provides the following:
- Readers currently on site
- Upvote to read ratio (WIP)
- Filter by pages
- Filter by referrers
- Location of reader
- Device of reader
- OS of reader
- Export all analytics information as a CSV
- Make analytics public (to share with a team or show off)
Fathom analytics
If you need even more in-depth analytics, such as minute-by-minute logs, time-on-site, bounce-rate, granular referrers, etc, then Fathom analytics is a great, privacy-respecting analytics provider. Once you've signed up (get $10 off with the above link), simply add the site ID in the form in Analytics settings on the Bear analytics page and it should JustWork™.
A note about Google Analytics
Bear does not (nor will ever) support Google Analytics. They have shown time-and-time-again that they cannot be trusted with user data and are the epitome of non-privacy friendly. Fathom does a pretty comprehensive writeup about this.