Hi, I'm watching you now :)

Hi there! I’m watching you now.

Yes you! All the viewers of my website.

It all started when I asked the simple question: how many people actually clicked to my website from my linkedin account. It would be nice to know how effective my website actually is and if there is any increase in number in certain seasons.

After doing some quick research, I found out that with the current stack that I’m using, it’s easiest to use vercel analytics to give basic analytics data. The process was super easy: using next.js, after installing vercel analytics to the project, you simply add an analytics tag to the bottom of your layout file. With this vercel automatically sends basic analytics to the vercel dashboard and I can now see exactly where my users are coming from.

But I was not yet satisfied.

I wanted to track certain events that can happen on my website as well. Stuff like how many times a button has been pressed, how many times a blog has been read, or how many times someone has tried to contact me. It seems like vercel analytics does have the means to doing this but I would have to upgrade to a paid tier. I wasn’t looking to spend money on this sort of thing so I thought about manually tracking these things.

This led me to the second way that I’m now tracking you all: using custom links that allow me to write click data to a supabase database and at the same time reroute users to the correct site requested. Now every time someone clicks on a link, it appears as a data point in my supabase dashboard.

This was getting good and I was about to implement similar things with my blogs and certain special events on my website. That is until I found out about a more powerful tool: Posthog.

Posthog is basically the exact tool used for doing these kind of things. It’s free tier is insanely powerful. The installation is straightforward. It automatically tracks everything I wanted it to and more.

The thing I find fascinating using posthog is that it creates session replays of how my users used my website. That means I can literally look at the exact behavior of my users on my website. All of this for free to me seems crazy.

So in the end, I’m now tracking my users on three different fronts. Yes; I can see you reading this blog with a complete replay of what you are clicking right now.

What surprises me after doing all this tracking though is the amount of traffic my website is getting. This website is sort of a fun hobby I do on my pass time but it is getting constant traffic into it. Unsurprisingly, not a lot of traffic, but still an average of 2 users per day (they’re not me).

So yea. Pretty cool.