BLOGGING FOR DEVS (#30)

Minimum viable analytics.

Happy Friday, friends!

One of the most frequent, repeat discussions in the Blogging for Devs community (and in my inbox!) is about analytics.

Specifically, Google Analytics alternatives and what metrics should you be tracking on your blog?

Here's what you need to know to set up your own, minimum viable analytics this weekend.

So, how do you pick an analytics tool?

There are a bajillion choices out there. It helps to start by figuring out the features you can't live without. Here's my list:

• Goals and custom events - This helps you set Goals for your site, like newsletter subscribers, trial signups, or track conversions to your product.
• Custom source data - By using utm tags, you can identify traffic coming from e.g. your newsletter, which is otherwise "dark traffic" you can't attribute.
• Referral data - You want to know not just the domain sending you traffic, but the URL itself.
• Filters out bots and scrapers - Some server-side services like Netlify Analytics do not filter out bots, which can give you a very inaccurate idea of your actual traffic (for my sites it's a literal 2x difference!).

Which options are out there besides Google Analytics?

For my own sites, I still use Google Analytics, but with all IP tracking and advertiser features turned off (here's how).

These days, there are tons of great options if you don't want Google on your site. Here are a few recommended by members of the Blogging for Devs community:

• Made by indie software companies: Fathom Analytics and Plausible
• Most powerful, but complex: Matomo
• Oldie but goodie: Clicky
• Can be self-hosted: Matomo, Plausible, Umami

I'd recommend spending your time writing articles instead self-hosting your own analytics 😉 Most of these solutions are pretty affordable, and you can try several at the same time to see what you like best.

Finally, which metrics should you be tracking?

Traffic alone feels great, but not all traffic is created equal.

That's why one of the most important things you can do is set up Goals for your website.

This helps you figure out which content and traffic sources are actually working best in terms of your "North star Metrics" like email subscribers, trial signups, or clicks to your social profiles, as opposed to just pageviews.

Here's an example from Blogging for Devs' homepage (larger here):

Here you can see that visitors from Twitter are 3.75x more likely to join the newsletter than those from Google 🤯

You can set up goals and events with Fathom, with Plausible, with Matomo, with Clicky, or of course, with Google Analytics.

With this one-time set up, you'll be able to answer questions like:

• What are my most popular articles?
• Which traffic sources are my readers coming from?
• Where are my best readers coming from, according to my Goals? (Like the image above)
• Which of my articles or pages on my websites converts best into email subscribers or clicks to my social profile?
• Are my goals doing significantly better or worse on desktop vs mobile?
• Which features of my site are readers actually using? (By adding events to clicks on tags, categories, or recommended posts)

Analytics can look like a number soup, but just a couple of views like this tells you most of what you need to know 🍜🔍

P.S. Don't forget to set up Google Search Console, too. You don't have to use Google Analytics to use it! It doesn't send any data to Google, just lets you see data Google already has about the search performance of your site.

Now it's your turn!

Hit reply to this email and share about your journey with web analytics:

Which analytics solutions have you tried, and how did you like them? Any favorites?

I hope this weeks' edition helped you get an idea of the ✨ analytics landscape ✨ and how a minimal setup can tell you a ton about your own website with just a couple metrics.

Thanks so much for reading! Til next time,

@monicalent

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