One of the things I’d correct if I had a chance to start writing Paystack frontend all over again is paying attention to in-product analytics. It’s high up on that list with user research, prototyping and usability testing (at least with the team).
We broke it down step-by-step, so if you’re building a startup and haven’t considered analytics, this is a good place to start. Also, we’re taking feedback and recommendations. What has worked for you?
As I read your article, an idea crossed my mind - it will be quite interesting if managed payment pages provide funnel analytics to merchants so that they can understand the bounce rates at specific stages of the payment cart flow, without having to hack or bolt on another analytics solution onto yours.
Great post. Analytics is one of the first things I set up on any site.
I’d say I do the same you do, minus Fullstory (for me it was a brief exploration of HotJar).
I run more of a ‘content’ site whose its traffic is 70% organic, so I’m mostly concerned with how and why people are getting on the site on a day-to-day basis.
For keywords, I use Search Console more because Analytics is borderline useless when it comes to Organic Search Keywords (over 80% of my keywords are not provided, thanks Google!), but SC gives very delayed results, so it’s hard to get good search data realtime as well. The metrics bringing people to my site on a daily basis change a lot (for instance, Africa Magic will air some movie on a Saturday night, and for that night and maybe the next morning a large amount of hits to the site will be people looking for info on that movie and by Monday, its traffic will disintegrate again; neither Analytics KW or SC are helpful for this), so I’ve come to rely a lot on GA’s ‘Landing Pages’.
Landing Pages don’t give the keywords but it’s not hard to figure out what they were due to past patterns. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. I just need to know which pages are getting the most action. From there I explore why. Is it an old movie? Then it means it was recently aired somewhere, that renewed interest. Newer movies tend to have more sustained high levels of traffic. Cinema releases tend to be the most visited, that kind of thing.
I also recently started firing events for ajax-requests (something it never occured to me to do before, which is silly since I was using AJAX calls to switch between content tabs and load the signin/signup module).