Ask HN: SaaS analytics - how much do you track?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014508

by drlaj • 13 years ago

8 3 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have inherited a web app with a bunch of features.

I was hoping to learn more about how people are using analytics to track usage of their web apps.

I'm particularly interested in hearing answers to the following questions:

1) Which services do you use (Google, MixPanel, KissMetrics)? Any recommendations? 2) How richly do you instrument your service to understand individual feature usage? 3) Have you used the APIs to extend the usefulness of the main analytics services?

dangrossman• 13 years ago

I use MixPanel for that, and did a pretty simple implementation

* The event-tracking snippet went into the layout template shared by all pages

* The only property on the event is the concatenation of the controller class and method name being executed -- this identifies what screen is being shown

So, basically, one line of code in one file instruments the whole app, and is enough to measure feature usage.

Here's what the resulting trends report looks like: http://i.imgur.com/6Uk8hjQ.png . Obviously, it can be filtered to compare fewer features or broken down by cohort more readbly.

karolisd• 13 years ago

Google Analytics isn't perfect (not meant to do cohorts or track users), but it's free and it can be used as a comparison with your server logs and other analytics services. (If the delta is very small, it means you have a good implementation, if the delta is large, maybe there's a problem in the implementation)

Besides the ones you mentioned, if you want to host your own analytics service and customize it, you can look into Piwik or Snowplow.

ra00l• 13 years ago

Besides GA, which I use for the public website, I am using an in-house web app to track activation and frequency of use.

My app is a windows app, not web. Mixpanel is nice, but it doesn't quite fit my case where I need to see individual events, per user.

Ask HN: SaaS analytics - how much do you track?

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