Switching analytics tools usually means starting with an empty graph. If you are moving from Plausible, you do not have to. Tidemark can import Plausible’s own CSV export, so your history carries over and your charts keep their shape. This guide walks through it and explains what to expect. The official steps live in the Tidemark docs.
Before you start
- Add the site to Tidemark first, using the same domain you track in Plausible.
- Set the site’s reporting timezone to match Plausible’s (Settings → General). Dates in the export follow the timezone the site had in Plausible, so a mismatch shifts days.
- You need to be an owner or admin of the site.
- Make sure there is room for the data. A very large export (3.5 years from a busy site, a 215 MB zip) added roughly 330 MB to a SQLite database, while small sites add very little.
Step 1: Export from Plausible
In Plausible, open the site and go to Settings → Imports & exports. Under Export data, click Prepare download. For a site with a lot of history this can take up to about 20 minutes, and you can leave the page and come back. When it is ready, download the .zip. Plausible keeps it for seven days.
Step 2: Import into Tidemark
- In Tidemark, open the site’s Settings → General and find Import from Plausible.
- Click Choose the .zip file and pick the download.
- Keep the tab open until it says the import has finished. A 200 MB export takes a few minutes.
You do not have to worry about upload limits. Your browser reads the zip and sends only the numbers Tidemark needs, in small batches, so the file is never uploaded as a whole.
What comes across
- Daily totals: visitors, visits, pageviews, bounce rate and visit duration.
- Sources: channels, sources, referrers and UTM campaign fields.
- Pages: top pages, entry pages and exit pages.
- Locations: countries and regions.
- Devices: device types, browsers and operating systems.
- Custom events: counted for goals that use the same event name, so create a goal with the event’s name to see them.
What does not
- Cities, because Plausible exports them as numeric ids.
- Custom properties, scroll depth and time on page.
- Goal definitions, funnels and shared links, which you set up again in Tidemark.
- Browser and operating-system versions. Tidemark reports each as a whole.
How imported data behaves
Imported numbers are daily totals, so they behave a little differently from data Tidemark collected itself:
- They appear in the top stats, the graph and the reports for periods made of whole days.
- They do not appear in hourly views such as Today.
- They are left out while a filter is active, because the export does not say how the numbers relate to each other. A note on the dashboard tells you when this happens.
- Visitors are added up day by day, the same way Plausible’s own numbers work across longer periods.
Overlap with Tidemark’s own data
Tidemark only imports days before the first day it recorded a visit for the site, so nothing is counted twice. If you ran Tidemark and Plausible side by side for a while, the days when both ran come from Tidemark.
Plan limits on Tidemark Cloud
On Cloud, imported days older than your plan keeps history are skipped: six months on Free and five years on Pro. Upgrading and importing again brings in the older days. Self-hosted installs have no such limit.
Switching the script
The Tidemark script is Plausible-compatible, so the switch is usually a one-line change: replace the Plausible script address with your Tidemark one and keep the same data-domain. Run both for a week if you want to compare. If you are comparing the tools more broadly, see Tidemark vs Plausible.