How makers stay productive

i use simple analytics

• you should always have something otherwise you are working blindly.

I don’t use Google Analytics anymore I use fathom now https://usefathom.com/ for privacy reason

You should definitely add something so you can see where people are coming from and how they are moving around your site.

Fathom and Simple Analytics (mentioned in the thread) seem to be the go-to choices for smaller projects nowadays. I use Fathom.

GA is free but you need to show cookie settings to your users.

I wouldn't use GA. I do not know a lot about how to integrate it with your privacy policy, and seriously don't want to know. When I launch a side project, I just want to have quick and simple statistics, and Fathom is awesome for that. (Also I would sound like a hypocrit, if I went out of my way to keep Google out of my personal life, but then let them track all my users). Also, people would feel like they are being pranked, if they went on https://hellogoodbye.app and saw a cookie banner.

If that sounds like you, I strongly encourage you to use Fathom. And as nobody else has done it here yet, I would like to share my affiliate link with you :P

https://usefathom.com/ref/CHXIBJ

(by the way, you get 10$ off as well with that)

Google analytics.

Having analytics (GA, Fathom, Simple Analytics,…) really helps seeing if your app/website is actually used or not. Not only by looking at the total number of visitors, but also finding out which pages work best. Time-on-site, bounce rate & scroll depth are very valuable when you want to know if a page is actually read.

It also makes it obvious when you have large drops in visitors, which can be the result of many different problems, but at least you can notice it right away. Maybe visitors immediately bounce because of annoying popups, maybe the UI is broken for some browsers, etc. These things can be really hard to notice and analytics can be very helpful in these cases.

That being said, I know that privacy is a very sensitive topic and scepticism is absolutely justified.

We recently added analytic to https://versoly.com/features/analytics, it is crazy how many people have adblock.

25-40% of our traffic does. I have heard some people with 60%.

Imagine having an amazing traffic source but you don't know because of ad block.

Because we handle our customers landing page we can bypass adblock with no extra work required from them.

Also GA is so complex. I had to do 4/5 clicks for one table and then the same multiple times.