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Micaforge

From Plausible

Importing Plausible's CSV exports, and what changes when the two audiences separate.

The closest neighbour, and the easiest move: both tools are cookieless, both count a session the same way, and neither has ever stored a personal identifier by default.

Get the export

Plausible exports its reports as CSVs: visitors by day, top pages, sources, countries, devices, and so on. Take the whole set for the period you want.

They are aggregate exports: one row per dimension value per day, with counts.

Import it

Upload on the site’s Imports screen. The importer resolves columns through a table of aliases, so Plausible’s column names are read without any reshaping.

Aggregate rows expand into events at the start of each day, capped at 10,000 per row and marked as an import in sdk_version. So imported days carry no hour-of-day shape: do not read that chart for the imported period.

Every imported row carries an import_id, so an import can be re-run without duplicating and undone with a delete.

What matches

  • Sessions. Both use a 30-minute inactivity gap.
  • Bounce rate and duration. Same definitions.
  • Pageviews. Same event.
  • Cookieless visitors. Both hash daily. Neither can honestly claim a monthly unique.

What changes

Bots become an audience. Plausible filters known bots out and shows you what is left. Micaforge names them, counts them in their own table, and shows you both. Your human numbers should look much the same; what is new is the second set beside them.

Answer engines leave the referral bucket. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and their peers are a top-level channel here, next to Search. Referral goes down; a channel you could not see before appears.

Custom properties. Plausible’s custom event properties come across as props, filterable as props.<key>.

Goals. Not part of a CSV export. Recreate them: there are usually few, and they take a minute each. See goals.

The one thing worth doing on the way in

Turn on the server log feed the same day. The reason to move to this tool is the half that Plausible does not have, and until a log is being shipped you have moved to a similar tool with a different colour scheme.