BleedingTech Analytics

Analytics is super, super important when it comes to websites. You want to be able see growth, trends, track engagement, see what your audience looks like etc. Now, we think that privacy is super important and by default, we disable Google Analytics from client websites since it is not GPDR or CCPA complaint. Instead, we decided to rely on an open-source alternative called Umami .

You want to be able to make really good, reliable business decision. Considering your website will be the hub for all of your online branding, it plays a pretty significant role. All your ads, campaigns, social profiles, even your business cards will likely have your website.

So that makes a perfect tool for seeing how your business is growing. But analytics are tough since there are dozens of metrics to track, a lot of data to store, multiple third-party integrations etc. This article basically explains how we handle analytics for us and our clients.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) are both laws designed to protect consumer data privacy and provide individuals with more control over their personal information.

The GDPR is an EU regulation that protects the privacy and personal data of EU individuals, enforceable since May 25, 2018. It requires organizations to process data lawfully, fairly, and transparently, while individuals have rights to access, correct, and erase their data.

The CCPA is a California law effective from January 1, 2020, enhancing privacy rights for California residents. It grants individuals the right to know what personal data is collected, access their data, request deletion, and opt-out of data sales.

We want to make sure we’re making sure our sites are complaint, not just for clients but for users as well.

Umami is genuinely really cool and we recommend checking them out if you’re thinking about adding analytics to your own site. Here are a couple of it’s features:

• GPDR and CCPA complaint
• No cookies stored on clients
• Stored data is anonymous
• Supports basically everything Google Analytics does

Another really important thing is that we run Umami ourselves. All data is stored with BleedingTech and so we keep an eye on scaling and how your website is going.

We also integrated Umami directly into our dashboard and in the coming months, we’re planning on build our own UI on top that clients can use to do things like export data, share, or generate reports etc.

The next thing we rely on is Microsoft Clarity . The big reason for this is seeing user journeys and heat-maps. It’s our job to make sure our clients have functionality and efficient sites and so we want to see how users go through the site or if there are any bugs.

The cool thing about Clarity is that it’s free, GPDR and CCPA friendly and supports unlimited traffic. Plus some other things like dead clicks, scroll depth, pages per session etc. Basically additional metrics that Umami doesn’t support.

We also want to see how websites are doing in terms of SEO. For this, Google’s Search Console is incredible since it let’s us see what terms lead to impressions of the site, see where the site places on the page, how many users are organically coming through. Then we link the search console entity to a Google Analytics property and use Google’s Analytics Data API to show clients the data.

Overall, it’s an incredibly useful tool for us and clients since SEO is something people often optimise heavily for.

We hate it :)

It’s great but there are too many privacy concerns, the overall web app feels slow, and you rarely need to run anything complex. But really, it’s because it’s unreliable. It’s not Google Analytics fault but seeing how it’s a privacy concern, most ad blockers will block Google Analytics from even loading. So the amount of users you see in Google Analytics isn’t necessary every accurate especially if your audience is tech literate.

We use Mux as our video provider since videos tend to be incredibly bandwidth-hungry and storing them is a pain. Mux makes life easier for us. A great benefit is that Mux offers video analytics that go very, very in depth. Things like start up time, latency, upscale and downscale metrics, rebuffer score etc. This is just more data we can use for optimisations etc.

Thank you for reading the article and we hope you found at least one thing you can add to your site for better analytics. Have fun 😊