Version 10 introduces a powerful, built-in analytics feature called Map Insights. This tool allows you to track and visualize how users are interacting with your maps, providing crucial data points for optimizing marker placement, content, and the user experience.
Enabling Map Insights #
Map Insights is not enabled by default to ensure the plugin has the lowest resource impact possible upon installation. It must be manually activated.
Maps > Settings > Advanced > Behaviour > Enable Insights
⚠️ Important Resource Note: Enabling insights will increase your site’s resource load. This is because we log front-end user events (such as a map view or a marker click) by sending a request via the WordPress REST API to your server. While this process is optimized, high-traffic sites may experience a noticeable increase in database activity.
Insight Retention Period #
Once enabled, you will also see the option to set the Insight Retention Period:
- This setting allows you to automatically manage and prune your insights database.
- You can set the retention period to 30, 60, or 90 days.
- Any data older than the set period will be automatically removed, ensuring your database doesn’t grow unnecessarily large over time.
Insights Dashboard #
Once insights have been enabled and your map has collected some user data, you can view the complete analytics dashboard.
Maps > Insights
The dashboard is organized by event type, which you can navigate using the left-hand menu. The following key user events are logged:
- Map Views: Tracks how many times a map was loaded by a user.
- Marker Opens: Tracks every time a user clicks a marker to open its info-window.
- Shape Opens: Tracks every time a user clicks a Polygon, Polyline, Circle, or Rectangle to open its newly supported info-window.
- Store Locator Queries: Tracks every time a user successfully performs a search using the Store Locator.
Key Metrics & Visualizations #
The dashboard provides a range of high-level metrics and data breakdowns for the selected event type:
| Metric/Section | Description |
| Top Map / Marker / Shape / Query | Identifies the single most viewed map, most clicked marker, most interacted shape, or most common search term. |
| Unique Events vs Total Events | Differentiates between the total raw number of actions (Total Events) and the number of distinct users who performed the action (Unique Events). |
| Top Device / Top Browser | Breaks down user interaction by the specific operating system and browser used (e.g., Windows, macOS, Chrome, Safari). |
| Top Form Factor | Categorizes user interaction into Desktop or Mobile to help you understand your audience’s primary viewing environment. |
| Charts | Includes a detailed chart (a time-series graph) that visualizes the event count over the specified date range, allowing you to easily spot trends or traffic spikes. |
| Report | Table breakdown of events logged for the viewed metric |
How do you track unique users? #
We track unique users by generating an anonymous fingerprint cookie when a user first views a map on your site. This cookie is unique to that specific user’s browser.
Crucially, this system means we do not store or track any personally identifiable user information such as IP addresses, physical locations, or personal data. The cookie simply allows us to reasonably and accurately determine if a map view or interaction is from a new user or a returning user.
How do you determine the user’s browser and device type? #
We determine the user’s browser and device type by extracting the information from their User Agent string.
The User Agent is a standard, non-identifiable browser signature sent with every request. We use this signature to accurately predict the user’s specific browser (e.g., Chrome, Safari, Firefox), their operating system, and their form factor (Desktop or Mobile).
How are events stored? #
All Map Insights events are stored in a dedicated database table within your WordPress installation. This keeps the insights data isolated from your primary marker and map datasets.
When a user interacts with a map (e.g., opens a marker or views the map), the event data is securely sent in the background via the WordPress REST API and is immediately logged, allowing the data retention period to be accurately enforced.
How often is the data retention period enforced? #
The system checks for and removes old data once per day.
To optimize performance and minimize unnecessary resource usage, this check is only initiated if there has been recent site activity involving map events. By tying the cleanup process to user events, we ensure the data retention check is run efficiently and is limited from running when your site is inactive.
Will you add more events to the dashboard? #
Yes, we plan to expand the data collected.
For the V10 release, we have focused on core interactions: map views, marker opens, shape opens, and store locator queries. In the future, we intend to expand this dataset. If there is a specific interaction or dataset you are hoping to learn more about, please let our support team know your feedback!
Can I export my insights data? #
At the moment, it is not possible to export the data directly through our Insights dashboard.
For advanced users, the data is accessible via the dedicated insights database table, which can be exported using standard database management tools (like phpMyAdmin). We recognize the importance of this feature and plan to add dedicated export tools to the Insights dashboard in a future release.
