Adding tailor-made analytics to your Stacker apps, using PostHog

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After my post about Adding a chatbot dedicated for customer support (Chatwoot) to Stacker, here comes the so awaited showcase about Stacker and PostHog, for tailor-made analytics!

In the video, we’ll see how we:

  • Track every page a user navigates to (even tabs!)
  • Track every action a user does (click on a button, on a link, opening a document, etc.)
  • How to “see” what a user did (using “Recordings”), to better understand how they use our app
  • Track specific metrics (user identity, when they first did X action, how many times an action was made, etc.)
  • Build dashboards and charts

And, what’s really awesome is how quick we did all this, because most of it is tracked automatically!

:point_right: Watch the video

About PostHog

In the video, we use PostHog to track the visitor’s actions, and see how it reflects on our analytics tool.

PostHog is really awesome, not only it is like a million times easier to understand/use than Google Analytics, but it also comes for free (up to 1 million/events/months)

If you ever need to scale, it’s also possible because it is open-source and self-hostable, while providing a cloud offering to get started quickly for free.

Also, it’s GDPR compliant (unlike GA, which is forbidden if you’re processing the data of EU citizens)

Also, unlike free but closed-tools like Amplitude, you get full control over your data and can export them and reuse them for free! (Amplitude allows that, starting from ~$50k/year)

Cherry on cake, it comes built-in with a “Recordings” to watch how visitors use your app!
Watch the above video to see it in action!

I love PostHog for many reasons, but mostly because it made something that was hard to do, long to setup, and overall not fun at all, into something simple.

:point_right: Now, I spend my time creating charts and thinking about which ones I need for my business (what KPIs), instead of thinking about how/what I must collect.

I wrote a custom integration that makes tracking users and their actions really simple and effective:

  • Recognize users even on different devices (merge devices into the same user)
  • Tracks custom properties (make data “resurface” to have them stored in PostHog, mostly to enhance the User profile)
  • Aggregate users into groups, such as companies, etc. to have “by-group aggregations”
  • GDPR-compliant

Let me know if you’d like to install it on your app!

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Very interesting! Do you think setting up PostHog like this is something a person with little coding skills can learn? I’d love to try making this work for my app.

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Well, it’s certainly possible. You would need to study/analyse how PostHog works, basically reading their documentation and come up with an implementation for Stacker.

Depending on what your goals are, the difficulty will rise from “easy” to “difficult” (IMHO).
But as always with programming, set different goals, and improve things incrementally, you might end up with a fully working implementation without noticing it! :slight_smile:

If you’re interested in the “programming” journey, I’d suggest to set different goals/features (make it “just work”, then deduplicate devices (detect/merge users on different devices), then X, then Y, etc.) - Drop me a note if you get stuck

If you’re interested in quick results, then hiring an expert to build a tailor-made solution based on your specific needs is more appropriate, but my gut tells me you’re more interested in the journey itself. :wink:

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That’s really great advice, thank you @Ambroise. I’ll try things out myself and message you if I get stuck!

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You’re welcome!
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me then :slight_smile:

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I made a new video, focused on even more advanced analytics PostHog features, such as:

  • Tracking groups (companies, etc.) to aggregate data of multiple users through groups of people
  • Building custom charts, to track business KPIs (average session duration, usage per company, etc.)
  • Creating your own “Custom actions”, which allows you to visually define which elements to track, PostHog helps even non-technical people to track exactly what they need, in a “no-code” way.

:point_right: Read my article to learn more about how I can help you integrate advanced analytics!

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