Comparing 5 Analytics Tools for the 2coffee.dev Blog

Problem

When owning a website, everyone wants to know how effective it is. For example, how many daily, monthly, yearly visitors it has, what pages they visit, what actions they take, etc. This information helps us plan upgrades or adjustments to improve the conversion rate and generate revenue.

Google Analytics (GA) is a well-known name in the web analytics field. According to statistics, GA is always at the top of the list of analytics tools. GA is powerful, but fully exploring its capabilities is not easy.

From the early days, 2coffee.dev chose GA as its analytics tool. Thanks to GA, I can understand the current situation and make decisions on what actions to take next. However, I am not a professional data analyst, so I can only view a few basic reports, while GA is more complex. Recently, I have started using some simpler analytics tools. Today, I am here to share what I have discovered during this process.

5 Analytics Tools

Google Analytics

First is Google Analytics, a well-known tool and a product of Google. It collects a wealth of useful information not only for you but also for Google.

I integrated GA into my blog from the beginning to collect data on daily users, number of visits, and which pages they accessed. This helps me gauge their interest in the content and create more relevant articles.

GA has many features. Some reports I am interested in as a daily user include the number of users, session duration, bounce rate, new users, traffic sources, and popular articles. GA also allows tracking specific events like button clicks or interactions with certain elements. This helps me optimize the user experience on my website.

However, GA can be difficult for beginners. I remember spending a lot of time learning its features. The interface can be overwhelming, and I didn't fully understand the functionality of many built-in features.

Another drawback is the privacy concerns with GA. Many browsers default to blocking all tracking tools, including GA, which can result in incomplete and inaccurate data collection.

Posthog

Posthog is a versatile tool that I have written about in an article titled Introducing Posthog - User Data Collection for "Engineers". It has some similarities to GA, such as user and page tracking, but it also offers additional user research features like session recording, surveys, A/B testing, and data pipeline.

I use Posthog for user behavior analysis on my website. For example, analyzing mouse movements, interactive areas, user interactions, and quickly detecting interface issues for prompt fixes.

Posthog is an open-source tool, but they also offer a limited free plan on their Cloud. If you have a high-traffic website and want to freely use all the features, you may need to upgrade to a paid plan. Like GA, Posthog may also raise privacy concerns and be blocked by similar tools.

Cloudflare Analytic

Since migrating my blog to Cloudflare (CF) using their service as described in the article Completing the Blog Migration to "Web is on the Edge", I discovered that CF also provides web analytics.

Unlike GA and Posthog, CF does not require adding JavaScript code to the website for data collection. If your domain is using CF's DNS service, all requests will be captured and analyzed by CF, making it difficult for regular ad-blockers or browsers to block. This means CF's user and traffic data is more accurate.

However, CF's analytics dashboard is relatively simple and lacks the customization options of GA or Posthog. Personally, I use CF primarily to block bad traffic.

Search Console

Search Console or Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster are tools that help website administrators understand the SEO performance of their websites on popular search engines.

To have a website indexed and found on Google or Bing, you need to inform these search engines through their respective data collection tools, such as Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster. These tools crawl your website, gather data, and distribute your content to users when they search. They provide analytics related to SEO effectiveness.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing website quality and traffic by improving its visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. For SEO analysis, I focus on metrics such as traffic sources, keywords, number of visitors, and other important information. Each tool provides additional analysis features. For example, Google Search Console can track SEO issues, data indexing, or poor user experiences on certain pages.

Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics (SA) is the newest tool I integrated into my website. It is a paid tool, but I am lucky enough to use it for free.

SA has a unique data collection approach, emphasizing user privacy. As a product from the EU, they strictly follow certain principles, like not using cookies or collecting IP addresses. You may refer to their detailed data collection policy in the Metrics - Simple Analytics Docs.

True to its name, SA's analytics dashboard is relatively simple and clean. It provides essential information such as user count, page views, session duration, devices, browsers, and countries of origin. SA also supports event tracking and has an AI feature that allows direct communication for specific data requests.

SA is simple, focuses on user privacy, and provides real-time data collection. It is definitely worth trying.

Conclusion

This article presented 5 analytics tools I use to develop my blog. I hope this information helps readers choose the right tool for their needs. If you have experience with a different tool, please leave a comment for others to know.