Read Your Growth Data with Cosmic Insights

Once agents are producing content on a schedule, the question stops being "can we make more" and becomes "is any of this working." Cosmic Insights answers that inside the dashboard, and it can attribute traffic to individual pieces of content rather than just to URLs.

This lesson covers installing the tracker, reading the tabs that matter, and the one report that will change what you publish next.

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Before You Start

• A Cosmic project with a deployed site

• Project admin access. Insights only appears in the sidebar for project admins

• Insights is included on every plan. Free plans keep 30 days of history, and the longer date ranges show a lock icon with an upgrade prompt

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Step 1: Find Insights

Click Insights in the project sidebar. It sits at the project level rather than the bucket level, so it covers every bucket in the project by default. A filter in the header lets you narrow to one bucket, or leave it on All buckets.

If no data has arrived yet, the page shows a card titled Get started with Cosmic Insights with the setup steps below.

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Step 2: Install the Tracker

Insights needs a script on your site. Copy it from the setup card and put it in the of your app:

It fires a pageview on every navigation, including client-side route changes, so there is nothing else to wire up.

Data starts appearing within about five minutes of a deploy. The live pill in the header shows 0 online until the first visitor arrives.

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Step 3: Connect Pageviews to Content

This is the step that makes Insights more useful than a generic analytics tool.

On any page that represents a Cosmic object, add a meta tag identifying that object:

That is all it takes. Cosmic looks up the rest from the object record. Without it, Insights knows that got traffic. With it, Insights knows which object that was, what type it is, and can group traffic by content rather than by URL.

The practical difference: URLs change, get redirected, and get duplicated across locales. Objects do not. Attribution by object survives all of that.

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Step 4: Read the Overview

The Overview tab opens with four tiles, each clickable to redraw the chart below:

• Visitors

• Pageviews

• Sessions

• Bounce Rate

Each shows a change against the previous period of the same length.

The date range defaults to Last 7 days. The presets are Last 24 hours, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 3 months, Last 12 months, and Last 24 months, plus a calendar button for a custom range. Presets beyond your plan's retention are locked.

Below the chart, Request Distribution maps where traffic came from, with a Top locations list beside it. Under that are three summary tables, each with a View all link: Top pages, Top content, and Top sources.

A word on the Overview: it is the tab you will look at most and learn from least. Traffic being up or down tells you something happened. The tabs below tell you what.

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Step 5: The Tabs That Actually Answer Questions

Pages shows Top pages with columns for Path, Views, Visitors, Sessions, Bounce rate, and Revenue. A Columns button adds Top referrer, Top device, Top country, and Top source. There is a filter box for narrowing by path, and Export CSV.

Content is the one worth your attention. It shows Top content by Cosmic object: Object, Type, Views, Visitors, Sessions, and Revenue. Click any object to open a detail page with its own metric tiles, a Recent events table, and an Edit Object button that takes you straight to editing it.

That last part is the useful loop. You find an underperforming piece of content and you are one click from fixing it.

Sources shows Traffic sources broken out by Source, Medium, and Campaign, with Visits, Visitors, and Revenue.

Events is the raw event explorer, filterable by type: Pageview, Custom, Conversion, Revenue.

Custom events aggregates events you fire yourself, with Count, Unique visitors, and Revenue per event.

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Step 6: Track Something Beyond Pageviews

Pageviews tell you people arrived. Custom events tell you they did something.

Fire one from your app whenever it matters:

For anything with money attached, include the amount and it is classified as revenue automatically:

Revenue then appears as a column on the Pages, Content, and Sources tables, which is what turns "this post gets traffic" into "this post earns."

There is no screen for defining events ahead of time. You fire them from code and they show up on the Custom events tab once they have been seen.

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A Tip on Reading Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the most useful column on the Pages tab and the easiest one to misread.

A high bounce rate on a reference page is fine. Someone searched for a syntax detail, found it, and left satisfied. That is the page working.

A high bounce rate on a page meant to lead somewhere is a real problem, and it usually means the page did not deliver what the search result promised.

So do not scan for the worst bounce rate on the site. Sort by Views, look only at your top handful of pages, and ask of each one whether a visitor leaving immediately counts as success. Fixing bounce rate on a page nobody visits changes nothing.

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Going Further

Every table has Export CSV if you want to combine Insights data with something else.

Insights counts events against a monthly allowance and keeps history for a period that depends on your plan, so if you are comparing year over year, check that the range you need is not locked before building a habit around it.

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Do This in Your Project

1. Go to Insights in the project sidebar

2. Add the tracker script to your app's and deploy

3. Add the meta tag to one templated page type, such as blog posts

4. Wait for data, then open the Pages tab and sort by Views

5. Look at your three highest-traffic pages and find the one with the worst Bounce rate

6. Open the Content tab, find that same piece, click through, and use Edit Object to fix the mismatch between what it promises and what it delivers

One page fixed on evidence beats ten published on instinct.

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Up Next

Lesson 12: Team Roles, Seats, and Permissions

You can now see what works. Stage 5 covers scaling the operation beyond one person, starting with who gets access to what.