Ask HN: Should I add analytics code to my web projects?

4 points by imrehg 10y ago ↗ HN

I have a couple of small single-page or few-page web projects that seemed to have gathered positive feedback from people[0][1]. I would be interested if and when these projects spread beyond my personal circles, if others find them useful and actually use them too. On the other hand, I would like avoid giving any kind of "monkey business" impression. I know that a lot of people are aversive to tracking stuff like Google Analytics, and thus I hesitate putting that on the project pages, but then I definitely not going to hear about pingbacks or uses of them, unless someone directly tells me about that (very rare).

What's the thought on HN? Track to be able to react to analytics insights, or not track and stay in the dark but sort of being more "clean"? Do you put GA code on all your projects? Under what circumstances do you not do that?

Project examples:

[0]: https://gergely.imreh.net/twbankssl/ "Taiwan Bank SSL status" (has GA code)

[1]: http://imrehg.github.io/taiwanmap/ "Taiwan City Maps overlays" (does not have GA code)

4 comments

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detaro 10y ago ↗

There's always Piwik and other self-hosted solutions as a compromise (more work for you, probably worse data, but "cleaner")

imrehg 10y ago ↗

That's an idea, thanks for the feedback!

saturngirl 10y ago ↗

Put GA code in every project and let people know that they can always opt out - https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

Without analytics, you wouldn't know if any of your projects is getting traction, being used or any information on how your project is being used. Analytics is super helpful and if you are against GA in particular, a self hosted Piwiki instance like detaro suggested would work perfectly well too.

Thanks for the feedback!