Import your history
Bring a site's history from Plausible, so the dashboard does not start at zero the day you install SimpleData. On every plan; imported days do not count towards your monthly page views.
How
- In Plausible: Site settings → Imports & Exports → Export data. Plausible emails you a ZIP.
- In SimpleData: your site's dashboard → Settings → Import data. Upload the ZIP as it is, or the CSV files inside it.
- The file is checked whole first. If something is wrong (a missing or unknown column, a value that is not a date or a count, a day twice), nothing is imported and the page says which file, line and column.
- Then it is written in the background and the page shows how it goes. It usually takes seconds. Imports go one at a time: if another one is being written, the page asks you to try again in a few minutes.
What is imported
| File of the export | Where it shows |
|---|---|
| imported_visitors | Page views, visitors, bounce rate, visit duration, views per visit and the chart. Required. |
| imported_pages | Top pages |
| imported_entry_pages, imported_exit_pages | Entry and exit pages |
| imported_sources | Channels, referrers and UTM tags |
| imported_locations | Countries (not regions or cities: the dashboard has no panel for them) |
| imported_browsers, imported_operating_systems, imported_devices | Browsers, operating systems and devices |
| imported_custom_events, imported_custom_props | Not imported: goals, outbound links, downloads, 404s and event properties start with SimpleData |
Which days count: never one twice
- Only the days before SimpleData recorded the site itself. If both tools ran at the same time, the days SimpleData has are its own, and the import leaves them out. The day you import is not imported either: it is not over.
- A second import of days already imported is refused. To import again, delete the first one.
- An imported day is a whole day in the site's time zone (Settings → Time zone). Set the same zone as in Plausible before importing, or the days will be cut differently.
- Days older than your plan keeps (6 months on Free, 24 on Pro) are not imported, and imported days are deleted like the rest once they pass it.
How the figures add up
- Visitors of imported days are each day's unique visitors added up, as Plausible does with imported data: someone who came on two days counts twice in a range.
- A Plausible visit ends after 30 minutes without activity; in SimpleData a visit is a visitor in a day. Bounce rate, visit duration and views per visit add up both kinds of visits, each weighted by its number of visits.
- Channels are worked out with SimpleData's own rules from the referrer and the UTM tags. When a visit has neither, Plausible's source name (from ?ref= or ?source=) stands in for the tag, and Google and Bing ad clicks count as Paid Search. That is close, not exact.
- Referrers are the domain, without the path, as SimpleData keeps them. Plausible drops "www.", so www.google.com (SimpleData) and google.com (imported) can be two rows.
- Referrers and UTM tags count the visits that arrived with them, and Direct or None the rest of the day's page views, which is how SimpleData counts its own (only the first page of a visit carries them). Channels count every page view of those visits.
- Browser and system names become SimpleData's (Microsoft Edge → Edge, Mac → Mac OS…), with versions added up. Plausible does not tell Safari on an iPhone from Safari on a Mac.
- Each imported day keeps the 100 biggest rows of each panel (pages, referrers, countries…). The rest of that day is added up in one row, "(other)", so the panel still adds up to the day's total; a page that was never in a day's top 100 does not show by name.
What imported days cannot do
- Filters: with any filter on, imported days are left out, and the dashboard says so. They are daily totals per panel, not visits that can be filtered by page, country and channel together.
- The hourly chart: an imported day has no hours.
- Funnels, paths, goals, the store, scroll depth and time on page, the live map, the email alerts and the weekly report use SimpleData's own data only. The read-only share link shows imported days as the dashboard does.
- The comparison with the previous period counts imported days as recorded, as long as there is no gap between them and SimpleData's own data. When one period has imported days and the other does not, or either mixes both, only page views are compared: visitors and visits are counted another way on each side, and the dashboard says so under Page views.
Limits
Up to 30 MB uploaded, 20 MB of CSV once unzipped and 200,000 rows per import. An account keeps up to 200,000 imported rows across all its sites (counted after the cut to 100 rows a day per panel). If an export is larger, leave out the files you do not need (imported_locations is usually the largest) or delete an import you no longer need. Imports also pause while our database is nearly full.
API and MCP
They return the same figures as the dashboard, imported days included; their summary says how many under "imported", and "comparable": "pageviews" when only page views can be compared with the previous period.
Deleting an import
From the same page. Its days leave the dashboard at once, and the file can be imported again.
Google Analytics
Not yet. It will arrive through Google's API, with the same rules.
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