What's your analytics setup?

There is two types of analytics (making a simplification here), product & marketing

Google Analytics is better suited for marketing

IMO product analytics is the most important one

First, you need to ask yourself the right questions, because tracking everything is useless

• What do I want to learn from my users ?
• What user behaviors drive the desired outcome?

Then you will have to find metrics that will help you answer those questions

After that, you set up a tracking plan (which events & properties will help you calculate your metrics and user behaviors driving those metrics)

In general, you will end up with:

• Events for your most important actions of your app (the ones that drive the desired outcome)
• Pageviews
• General info about the users
  .. something like that

My advice is to start small and iterates: choose one metric (north star) and only track things related to it :)

I'd like to make a plug here 😇

Me and @jkbl made a software that integrates business data from multiple sources and delivers performance reports via email.

If you're using apps like Google Analytics, G. Search Console, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Stripe etc., you will most likely find it very useful.

You can give it a try at www.raport.pro. We're still in beta so you'll pay $0.

I use panelbear.com. I like how i can track my website's performance and analytics in the same tool. It also has a nifty feature which allows you to setup alerts for traffic spikes or performance degradation of any particular page etc. Moreover, it is created by a fellow indie hacker, @anthonynsimon

I previously used Google Analytics and Amplitude but found I wasn't using the vast majority of the functionality and felt pretty gross about the user privacy implications.

Recently I've been switched all new projects to just Plausible. It's pretty simple, but honestly it's got everything I need. I would like a funnel view but you can get the same data with custom events (I believe funnel view is on the road map).

I use next.js, and with next-plausible it is super simple to set up a proxy so ad blockers are less of an issue.

Since Plausible doesn't collect any personal info, it's been a great feeling to get reliable, privacy-friendly info.

I do pay $6/month, but it seems totally fair to me.

Is Plausible missing functionality that others are looking for?

For GummySearch (my audience research tool), I use:

• google analytics for basic tracking
• fullstory (live user recordings) to assess UI issues
• my own in-house metrics for product adoption
• newrelic for application monitoring

Currently assessing fathom and plausible for a side project we're building.

Swaying towards plausible at the moment! 🥷🏼

Although, keen to understand how paid campaigns etc. work via Bing / Google etc.

If you are like me and don’t like feeding Google free data I would recommend Fathom (usefathom.com). They are small company and highly focused on user data privacy.

Also they have tools to not let adblocker s block your analytics stream)

If you're looking for a privacy-friendly product analytics tool (event-based), check out my product Fugu.

For web analytics (visitor-based), I use and highly recommend Plausible.

Use our own tool called Squeaky on the Squeaky website 😍 Though we can't use it in our app as it gets pretty inception-like when we're feeding analytics data from the analytics tool into it... shit gets crazy haha

We're using Simple Analytics. We chose it over plausible and fathom as they are the "most private" one. Works great. Has the same features as both plausible and fathom.

HockeyStack for marketing, product, revenue, sales. Integrated with MailChimp, Paddle, Crisp, Hubspot to pull all data in.

I use Splitbee and Hotjar for the analytics of https://twayobiz.com

Using umami.is on all our projects at The Hasselnöt

I use usefathom.com. Used to use Google Analytics but the UI has became so convoluted it's hard to find the simplest reports. I really only need to see how many visitors came to each page per day. It also comes with site monitoring which is a nice bonus.

These are my common analytics tools for any new project.

1. Heap Analytics (heap.io) - I would highly recommend mastering it if you want to capture the "real" user behaviors.
2. Google Analytics - just for the vanity matrix, I won't make any business decision based on it!

That's all really. :)

If you you're small company or bootstrapper and don't like unnecessary scripts loading in background then you can try https://appmetrix.com

It is privacy focused web analytics which doesn't track your user's personal information.

I would recommend getting all your data into an sql data warehouse using fivetran, segment or similar. Whatever website analytics tool you end up deciding for, you will eventually want all your data in one place. It just makes the whole analytics process a lot easier. There are lots of good and easy to use analytics tools out there that are either cheap or open source.
I am currently working on a notebook style alternative that is free while in beta and will have a freemium plan. Query.me.

We use Amplitude for most things. Their free plan is quite generous and you can get good insights but it requires a bit more manual labor.

I would not advise you to build your own it's not worth it IMO if it's not the core of your business or you want to learn about how to do it.

If you want more privacy and are just looking at something that replaces GA you can also check out https://simpleanalytics.com/, I've heard good things

Google analytics plus my own. Soon as I can develop some sort of real time traffic metric, I plan on dumping google.