from Hacker News

Ask HN: An easy way to provide analytics to customers?

by funfunfunction on 4/22/21, 6:50 PM with 4 comments

I'm working on a real estate application where users can create property listings and other users can view/interact with these listings. I'd like to provide some basic interaction metrics to the first group of users like page views, time spent on page, unique page views, etc as well as some custom interaction events like "user clicked a button" or "user viewed X document". I know Google Analytics provides their "Analytics APIs for ISVs"[1] toolkit but it doesn't seem to fit the use case quite right and I really don't like the idea of Google controlling all this data and making me ask politely for access.

Does the HN community have any recommendations on how to handle this? Providing users with this kind of information seems like a fairly common feature. Is everyone writing bespoke analytics toolsets for their applications or offloading the task to Google? Are their OS alternatives that I'm not finding?

Any advice is much appreciated, thanks in advance!

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/integrate/isv

  • by XCSme on 4/23/21, 4:06 PM

    I am working on https://www.usertrack.net, but tracking currently only works per domain, I assume your user listings are at a specific path? You can contact me via the contact form on the site to discuss integration options or how to separate the stats per user instead of per domain.

  • by TechBro8615 on 4/22/21, 6:58 PM

    Use an open source analytics solution like Matomo (fka Piwik) and make some custom views of the their MySQL (technically MariaDB) database that returns data for the specific customer.