Lacking analytics data on most customers 😕
About 60% of Divjoy customers block Google Analytics, so I have no idea how they got to the site. I'd really love to have a better idea of where my customers are coming from. How do you deal with this?
A couple of things I'm thinking:
- Store referrer in Local Storage and then add to Stripe user.metadata at the time of purchase. Not great, but at least I can look it up.
- Use another analytics service that allows me to serve the script from own domain. Is this even a thing? Is this unethical? Any thoughts on this?
- Have a post-purchase page where users can optionally add a comment about how they found the site.
I'd love to hear any other ideas or thoughts on this topic in general.
In the end of the day if you don't want tracking to be blocked it'll have to be hidden in the backend or a frontend custom script. Problem is not coding the tracking itself, but where do you store data (segment.io seems to be an option how @blakerson put it).
I am using my own dashboard service that makes both options easy. See an example here: https://bashboard.io/bashboard/system <- here I'm tracking system stuff, but it can be used for anything from user tracking to space station health checks. The idea is that you can send data (a fetch) from anywhere and you'll get charts in return. You can visualize your whole user-path there if you like.
Just go to https://bashboard.io/gabe to get started (it'll only take 30sec to try it out).
The service is still in beta (very much so) so if something's wrong email me (email is starting at you in the app).
Yeah, it's not uncommon to see 50%+ of traffic block Google Analytics. Browsers like Brave and Firefox block it, extensions such as uBlock Origin block it etc.
You could try and run Plausible Analytics alongside Google Analytics and compare the stats. Plausible Analytics script is only 1.4 KB so won't have an effect on your site speed. It doesn't use cookies nor collect personal data so no need to worry about being unethical.
You'll be able to see unique visitors, page views, referral sources, top pages, geographical details and device/OS/browser too. There's a live demo here.
Plausible looks amazing. I'll have to give this a try.
Glad you like it! Curious to hear your feedback after you try it!
You could try switching your site from Zeit to Netlify. They are both pretty similar and Netlify has built-in server-side analytics for $9/mo.
Good point! I think I need a bit more than Netlify offers, like funnel analytics, but this is a good idea for some of my other sites.
Server-side analytics are an option, too. It’ll take more implementation effort, but you can get to parity with what a fully-featured tool like GA would get you on the client side.
👋 Hey Blake! In that case, does the server just act as a proxy and send data to GA, Amplitide, etc or does that generally imply storing/querying data yourself?
Hay :D
You could do either. I recommend the former, just to prevent you from having to maintain your own analytics infra or query ability.
Not to be a Segment shill (but they've got awesome capability for a tool with a free tier), but they support server-side forwarding to my personal choices for tools, GA and Mixpanel (among others). They sometimes call it "cloud mode":
https://segment.com/docs/connections/destinations/#connection-modes
https://segment.com/docs/connections/destinations/catalog/google-analytics/#server-side
This is a smidge more effort than a typical client-side installation, since in my experience nothing comes "for free" on the server side. You probably need to do your own getting and setting of whatever you need. That could be more than just "what page is the user on," including basics like geolocation (usually provided by client IP), device class (usually derived from useragent), and so on. Then again, Segment may cover a lot of that for you using one of their libraries. I've never used their server-side forwarding.
Fringe benefit: server-side implementation also lets you send analytics events from your billing code, which opens up really cool possibilities like tying all your analytics events to your MRR and churn to find correlations. (This is, however, so advanced that I'm leaving it out of the first book.)
Thanks for the detailed explanation @blakerson! Didn't realize segment had this ability, so will definitely look into doing this.
Maybe look at https://usefathom.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/ if you feel it is unethical but want to know where they come from.
I have seen as high as 50% on some days but 60% that is crazy.
I guess I assumed those would both be blocked as well, but maybe some ad blockers let them through due to their privacy stance. Will give it a try. Thanks!
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Not sure if it as an option, but I use https://ackee.electerious.com/ for some of my websites. It is a self-hosted analytics tool, so you can serve the script from your own domain. It doesn't have all the fancy features GA has, but for most of my projects it is sufficient. It can track views, which pages have been visited, referres, Durations, screen size and browser language.
You can also try splitbee.io :)
It gives you basic analytics + funnels, user browser & A/B testing!
It's currently also not blocked (Its not privacy first). Custom domains coming soon!