I run quite a few websites by now and have used different analytics tools over the years.
Google Analytics can do pretty much everything, but for what I need, it’s far too complicated. I like Koko Analytics because of how simple it is, but there are a few things I’m missing. Other tools fall somewhere in between or get quite expensive once you have multiple websites or your traffic starts growing.
None of these tools are bad. They just never quite fit what I actually want.
That’s why I’m currently building my own analytics tool with Lienks.
At some point while building it, I started wondering which statistics I actually need. Analytics tools can show you all kinds of things: pageviews, visitors, sessions, bounce rate, exit rate, session duration and much more.
But just because something can be measured doesn’t mean the number is actually useful to me.
Bounce rate is a good example. I’ve already built it into Lienks. But if it tells me my bounce rate is 60%, I personally don’t really know what to do with that information.
Maybe someone came from Google, found exactly what they were looking for and left. Maybe the page was bad and that’s why they left. Maybe they simply didn’t feel like reading anymore.
The number alone doesn’t tell me.
That doesn’t mean bounce rate is useless. For other websites or businesses, it can be an important metric. For my own projects, it’s just not one of the things I regularly want to know.
So I turned the question around.
Not: Which statistics should an analytics tool have?
But: What do I actually want to know about my website?
Right now, I’ve ended up with twelve questions.
1. How many people am I reaching with my website?
This is probably the most basic question of all. How many people visit my website today, this week or this month? And is that number going up or down over time?
Since I run multiple websites myself, I’m also interested in how many people I reach across all of them combined.
2. How many people are on my website right now?
Sometimes I don’t want to analyze anything. I just want to know if someone is there right now.
Especially after publishing an article or sharing a link somewhere, I find it interesting to see whether people are currently using the site.
3. Where are my visitors coming from?
Are they coming from Google, Reddit, another website or directly to my site?
I want to quickly see which sources are actually bringing people to my website and how people are finding it in the first place.
4. How do people find me on Google?
If someone comes from Google, I also want to know what they searched for. Which search terms does my website show up for? How often do people click on it? And roughly where does it rank?
This data already exists in Google Search Console. I’d just like to see it alongside the rest of my website analytics.
5. Which pages get the most visits?
Which pages and articles are people actually interested in?
Especially on websites with lots of pages, I want to quickly see what gets read a lot and which pages barely get any visitors.
6. How long do visitors stay on my pages?
A pageview only tells me that someone opened a page. I’m also interested in whether they left after five seconds or spent several minutes on it.
Longer doesn’t automatically mean better. It just gives me a little more context around a pageview.
7. How do visitors move through my website?
This is something I find pretty interesting. Which paths do people actually take through my website?
For example:
Google → Blog post → Features → Pricing → Exit
I don’t necessarily need a complicated funnel where I have to define all the steps beforehand. First of all, I just want to see which paths actually happen.
8. What do visitors do on my website?
Not everything interesting is a pageview.
Maybe someone clicks a button, opens an external link, downloads something or uses an interactive element. I want to be able to track those actions when they matter.
What matters will obviously be different for every website. That’s why you can define them yourself as custom events.
9. Which countries are my visitors from?
To be honest, sometimes I’m interested in this simply because I’m curious.
Especially with international projects, I think it’s pretty cool to see that someone on the other side of the world is using my website. At the same time, it can of course be useful to know which countries most of your visitors are coming from.
10. Which devices do my visitors use?
Desktop, smartphone or tablet?
It’s a simple piece of information, but still useful. If most of my visitors are using their phones, I should probably look at my website that way too when I’m working on it.
11. How much of my traffic comes from real people and how much from bots?
Not every pageview comes from a person. Search engines, crawlers and other bots visit websites all the time and can sometimes distort the numbers quite a bit.
I want to be able to tell which traffic actually comes from people. But I don’t want to completely hide bots either. I’m still interested in how much bot traffic my websites are getting.
12. What’s happening on my website right now, and is anything unusual?
I don’t want to go through every number and chart myself just to figure out whether something interesting is happening.
Maybe yesterday was the strongest day my website has ever had. Maybe an old article is suddenly getting an unusual amount of traffic. Maybe my Google traffic has been growing for a few weeks, or one particular source suddenly starts bringing in a lot more people.
If something like that happens, I just want to see it in the dashboard.
And if nothing interesting is happening, Lienks doesn’t need to tell me anything.
Those are my twelve questions
These obviously aren’t the twelve objectively most important questions you can ask about a website. They’re simply the questions I want answered for my websites.
An online store, a large marketing team or an agency might have completely different requirements. That’s why Lienks shouldn’t be limited to these twelve questions.
Instead, I want them to define the default.
When I open Lienks, I want answers to these questions first. I don’t want to see every statistic that can somehow be calculated from the available data.
That’s why I didn’t remove bounce rate, for example. It’s there. It just isn’t shown prominently by default. If you need it for your website, you can add it to your dashboard. If you don’t care about another statistic, you can hide it.
That’s generally how I want to build Lienks: The default stays simple and focused, but if you need more, there’s more.
And maybe these twelve questions will change over time. Lienks is still pretty early and I use it myself every day. If I keep running into a question that I can’t answer with Lienks, that’s probably a pretty good sign that something is still missing.
So when I build the next feature, I don’t want to start by asking whether other analytics tools have it too.
I want to start with:
What question am I actually trying to answer?