ANALYTICS / LESSON 01

What Is Analytics?

How apps learn what users actually do, the main kinds of analytics data, and how to choose a tool

Written by Andrew Lee JenkinsPublished Oct 5, 20268 min readFree lesson

You built the app. People are using it. So which pages do they visit, where do they get stuck, and which features do they never touch at all? That's what analytics answers. This lesson covers what analytics is, where it sits in your app, and what to look for in a tool.

Guessing vs Knowing

Without analytics, you're guessing. You think the signup page is fine, and you have no clue that half the people who open it bail before they finish.

With analytics, you KNOW. You can see how many people started signing up, how many finished, and exactly which step lost the rest. "I think" turns into "the numbers show."

I'm a numbers guy about this stuff. When Seedly CRM's site cleared 100+ organic clicks in its first month on a two-month-old domain, I didn't have to guess whether anybody was showing up... I could see it.

The Main Kinds of Analytics Data

Page Views

Which pages people visit and how often. It's the simplest kind, and it's still useful.

Events

Specific actions you pick to track, like "clicked upgrade," "uploaded a file" or "finished onboarding." Events are where analytics gets really powerful.

Funnels

A series of steps, like visit, sign up, create first project. A funnel shows how many people make it through each step and where they fall off.

Retention

How many people come back after their first day, week or month. An app people try once and never open again has a problem that no feature list is gonna fix.

Session Recordings

Some tools can record how a visitor moved through your pages, so you can literally watch where they got confused. These need extra care around privacy.

Where Analytics Sits in Your App

Example

  User clicks a button
          |
          v
  Small analytics script in your app --- event ---> Analytics service
                                                          |
                                                          v
                                          Dashboards, funnels, charts

You add a lil piece of code to your app, usually called a snippet or SDK. It sends events to the analytics service as people use your app, and then you look at the results in the service's dashboard. Your own app keeps working exactly the same way. Analytics just sits there watching and reporting.

Privacy Comes First

Tracking people comes with responsibility. Depending on where your users live, you may need their consent before you track them, and you should never send passwords, payment details or other sensitive data to an analytics tool.

What to Look For

When you're comparing analytics tools, ask these questions.

What can it track? Page views only, or events, funnels and retention too?
How hard is setup? Look for a guide for your framework.
Does it help with privacy? Consent options, masking sensitive fields, where the data is stored.
Can you self-host it? Some tools let you run them on your own servers.
Does it do more than charts? Some tools add session recordings and feature flags, which let you turn features on for only some users.
How is it priced? Usually by the number of events per month.

The Tool in This Module

This module covers PostHog, an analytics tool that also does session recordings and feature flags. Its chapter walks through what PostHog tracks, how to add it to your app, and how to handle privacy and pricing.

After the PostHog chapter, the last lesson of this module takes every service from the past few modules and puts them together into one real app.

TL;DR

Analytics shows what users actually do, so you can quit guessing
Page views, events, funnels and retention are the main kinds of data
A small script in your app sends events to the analytics service
Respect privacy, track actions and never send sensitive data
This module covers PostHog, then ties all the services together

What's Next?

On to the PostHog chapter, starting with why analytics matters and the kinds of data PostHog tracks...

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