Import your history
Bring in the days before Pulse measured your site, from the export of the analytics tool you used before.
An import is a one-time backfill: the days before Pulse started measuring your site, filled in from the export of whatever tool you used before. It runs once per site. It does not touch a single day Pulse has already measured, and it cannot be repeated once it finishes. Delete it and start over if you need a different range.
Note
Pulse can import history from Plausible, Umami, Simple Analytics and Matomo. Importing from Google Analytics is not available yet.
Who can run one
Starting, cancelling or deleting an import needs the Manage integrations permission (Owner and Admin by default). Every member of the site can see that an import ran, its range, and its status. Reading is not gated.
One import per site
A site can hold one import at a time. While it exists, every other source is locked: delete the current import before starting a different one. This is also why an import cannot be extended after the fact. A longer range means deleting the import and starting again.
How far back
An import can reach back to your site's own history window, the retention your plan keeps, counted back from today. It also never reaches later than the day before Pulse started measuring your site (see below).
| Plan | History window |
|---|---|
| Personal | 6 months |
| Business | 24 months |
Upgrading your plan later raises this ceiling, but it does not extend an import already sitting on the old one. Delete and re-import to reach further back.
Pulse never overwrites a day it already measured. The boundary is drawn at whichever comes first: the day you connected Pulse, or the first pageview it actually counted. So a site that installed the script but had a quiet first week does not lose that week to the import.
Uploading an export
Plausible, Umami and Simple Analytics work from a file you export from that tool and upload to Pulse yourself. The file is read in your browser: it is parsed there, folded into daily totals, and only those totals are sent to Pulse. The export file itself never leaves your browser and is never stored, by Pulse or anyone else.
Warning
Keep the tab open until the upload finishes. It can take a while for a large export. If you close the tab, or your connection drops, the upload stops where it was. Choose the same file again on the Import tab and it carries on from there. Nothing already imported is lost.
Matomo works differently: Pulse connects to your Matomo instance directly and pulls the history itself, so there is nothing to upload and nothing to keep a tab open for. You can close the page once it is running and come back later to check on it.
Deleting an import
Deleting an import removes every day it added, immediately. It does not touch the days Pulse measured on its own, and it does not affect the tool you imported from. Deleting is also how you start over with a different range, a different export, or a different source.
Where imported history shows up
Once an import finishes, its days appear everywhere the rest of your history
does: the dashboard, share links, the public API, and MCP. The public API and
MCP responses mark which days came from an import with meta.imported, so a
script or an assistant reading your numbers can tell the two apart. Share
links only serve Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days and Last 30 days, so an
imported day only shows up on one if Pulse started measuring your site
within the last 30 days, and the imported range reaches that recently.
Note
The dashboard's numbers are cached for about a minute. Right after an import finishes, give it a minute before you expect to see the new days.
What merges, and what doesn't
Visitors, visits and pageviews from an import merge into Pulse's own numbers for every chart, table and export that shows them. A range spanning both imported and Pulse-measured days shows one combined number, with nothing to toggle.
Bounce rate and visit duration are different: they come from Pulse-measured days only, never from an import. A range made up entirely of imported days shows an em dash for both, with a note explaining why, rather than a number computed under some other tool's rules. This is deliberate. Bounce and duration are defined too differently from one tool to the next for adding them together to mean anything.
If you apply a filter, the view drops back to Pulse-measured days only for as long as the filter is active. An import can't be filtered, so filtering is the same as asking to see what Pulse itself has measured.
Not every source can supply every dimension. Plausible's export has no language or screen size; Simple Analytics' has no region or city. A source missing a dimension simply carries no imported data for that card, with a note saying so, rather than a blank or a wrong number.