A weekly review of visitor and revenue tiles

The short answer

Once a week, after you confirm which tiles are online, read visitor and revenue numbers site by site. Ask whether each site’s reported figures still look like that site. A docs site can be quiet. A store should not freeze at zero if the store’s own orders did not. The weekly review is how you catch a broken stats connection and a real change in the work, without turning every morning into an analytics meeting.

The daily pass stays short. Health, then a glance at anything that looks newly wrong, then alerts. The weekly pass is where you give the numbers ten or fifteen minutes. Mixing them is how outages hide inside spreadsheets and how spreadsheets hide inside outages.

Set a day and keep the list stable

Pick a weekday when you can look at every tile you operate. Monday morning is fine. Friday is fine. The important part is that the set of sites matches the portfolio, including the ones that bored you last week. A review that skips the quiet properties will never notice they went offline on Thursday and were never added back to the ritual.

Start from health, using the same meanings as any other day. Online, degraded, and offline are defined in the tile status article. Park any offline site into the fix list before you interpret its stats. A zero-visitor week on a site that was down for three days is an availability story. Write it that way.

Then open only the stats. Visitor and revenue tracking is on every paid plan, and the figures exist only if the site reported them. Empty is a setup state until proven otherwise. The ways numbers arrive are in how stats get onto a tile.

Read each site against itself

Take one tile at a time. Say what the site is for, in a few words: articles, store, app, docs, campaign page. The expected shape follows from that purpose.

A publication should show visitors if people are loading it and the counter is connected. Revenue may be zero forever if you do not sell there. Do not mark a content site as failing because revenue is empty.

A store should show revenue when orders exist in WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Stripe, or whatever source you connected. If the store admin shows orders and the tile shows none, your weekly task for that site is the pipe, not a marketing post. If both show none, the week was quiet. Those are different sentences. Write the true one.

An app’s marketing site and the app itself are different tiles if they are different hosts. Traffic on the marketing site with a dead app, or the reverse, is the kind of split a weekly review is for. A single blended number would hide it. Monitoring a SaaS marketing site, app, and docs together goes further on that split.

Use a sparkline if you send one, as a shape of recent counts. You are looking for a cliff, a flatline, or a steady line. You are not forecasting. One quiet week is not a trend. Two or three reviews in a row with the same cliff is a reason to open the site’s real analytics and look at sources, not a reason to invent a cause from the tile alone.

Write three lines, not a report

For the portfolio, keep a note with three lines.

Sites that were not online this week, and whether they are online now.

Sites whose reported visitors or revenue broke their own pattern, and whether you checked the source.

Sites you did not review because they are not in the dashboard yet.

That third line is the one people skip. A campaign subdomain launched on Wednesday is invisible until you add it. The weekly review is a good alarm for a missing tile, because you are already looking at the list. Adding sites the day you launch them is the tighter habit, described in building a site list that matches the portfolio. The weekly note catches the ones the launch day missed.

Do not rank sites against each other in this note. The store will “win” on revenue and the docs site will “lose.” That ranking has nothing to do with whether the docs site is doing its job. Compare a site to its job.

What to do with a break in the pattern

Work in a fixed order so the review ends.

If the tile is offline or degraded, follow what to do when a tile goes offline. Do not propose a content calendar for a site that does not answer.

If the tile is online and the stat is empty or frozen, test the connection. For WordPress, confirm the plugin saved the API key and that a push can run. For a custom endpoint, confirm the token and that a request returns visitors or revenue in the shape the API docs show. Give it one cycle — about a minute for a polled stats endpoint, about five minutes for the plugin — and look again.

If the tile is online, the connection works, and the source tool agrees the week was lower, then you have a real change. Decide what you will do about it outside DashCanopy: a post, a bug, a season, a paid campaign that ended. The dashboard’s job was to make the change visible next to the other sites. It will not write the post or repair the checkout button.

If webhooks are on, a quiet revenue tile plus a quiet order feed is stronger evidence than the tile alone. A quiet tile plus a feed full of orders means the stat field is the thing that is wrong. That cross-check is why Pro and Agency ingest events, and why the webhook article tells you to keep both.

Keep it weekly

The failure mode of this review is enthusiasm. You do it daily for nine days, resent it, and stop entirely. Daily is for health. Weekly is for the numbers. If a launch week needs a closer look, add one extra pass and then return to the weekly slot. Do not permanently merge the two.

Put the review on a calendar you already use. Open the dashboard first, not a blank spreadsheet. Copy the three lines out if you need them in a client update or a team note. Agency plans include up to five seats if several people share that note. Pro and Starter include one seat, so the review may be yours alone. Either way, one person needs to own the three lines or they do not get written.

Prices, caps, and intervals stay the ones on the pricing page: Starter $19, Pro $69, Agency $149 per month, with annual options at $190, $690, and $1,490.

Questions about the weekly review

Can I do this monthly instead?

You can, and you will discover broken stats a month late. Weekly is short because the tiles are already collected. Monthly is a reasonable cadence for a narrative report to someone else. It is a poor cadence for noticing a plugin that stopped pushing.

Should I export the numbers?

Export if you need a record somewhere else. The review itself can be done on the tiles. Copying every count into a sheet before you are willing to look is how the review becomes a bookkeeping chore and dies.

What if I have revenue in Stripe and visitors in another tool?

Use each as the source you connected, and expect them to answer different questions. Stripe knows charges. A page-view counter knows loads. The weekly question is whether each reported series is still flowing and still plausible, not whether two vendors print the same integer.