
Ask HN: Which is the least invasive way of tracking usage on a website? - factorialboy
We are launching a website early 2020 and it&#x27;s time to figure out our usage tracking strategy. Given that our business model is SaaS so the obvious metric the business is interested in is conversion of advertising campaigns leading to user acquisition.<p>Advertising platforms (such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.) will give us data in terms of views, click-throughs etc. and of course we will invariably have user acquisition data (it lives in our databases after all) so I wonder if we need obtrusive user tracking at all.<p>I&#x27;m sure I have overlooked certain aspects, thus I would like to invite your views. What is the most sensible metrics to track for in 2020 while respecting our users&#x27; privacy?<p>Thank you.
======
antoineMoPa
I described a way to acquire stats in a very non invasive way here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21345185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21345185)

No third party code, only fetch() and looking at log files.

So far this has been good for me to monitor which steps users were reaching
into the funnel + where they left & what caused delays.

------
doctor_m
Is your question asking about how to understand who's visiting your site and
what their motivations are without engaging in creepy, dragnet-style tracking?

~~~
factorialboy
We want to know which campaigns (and thus landing pages) are converting well,
and which are not. So that we can invest in user acquisition in an effective
manner.

Apart from that, not much else. We do not have an advertising model so we
don't need intimate details of our users and visitors.

~~~
dylz
You don't need to collect everything; can just use unique landing pages, log a
hit, and for signup include a specific campaign key (like "hn-spam-
upvoted-190530") in the <form> and you more or less get a funnel without
massive dragnets.

------
anotheryou
If you need to track individuals: don't record any personal data and a short
keep-alive of sessions/ids of just 20 minutes.

The biggest risk is that with this you are building infrastructure to do more
"malicious" tracking easily. Alternatively use logs/server sided events only I
guess.

------
mark_l_watson
I use an nginx plugin to count page hits per day, with no recording of user
data, IP addresses, etc.

------
zzo38computer
Server log files. It already works by itself, and no client-side code is
involved!

------
rogerkirkness
If you fire an event each time a page is loaded that can be helpful and basic
to implement.

------
stephenr
Analyse the access logs of your web server/cache layer.

This was a solved problem 20 years ago.

