Which is the least invasive way of tracking usage on a website?

Question

We are launching a website early 2020 and it's time to figure out our usage tracking strategy. Given that our business model is SaaS so the obvious metric the business is interested in is conversion of advertising campaigns leading to user acquisition.Advertising platforms (such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.) will give us data in terms of views, click-throughs etc. and of course we will invariably have user acquisition data (it lives in our databases after all) so I wonder if we need obtrusive user tracking at all.I'm sure I have overlooked certain aspects, thus I would like to invite your views. What is the most sensible metrics to track for in 2020 while respecting our users' privacy?Thank you.

antoineMoPa · Accepted Answer

I described a way to acquire stats in a very non invasive way here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21345185
No third party code, only fetch() and looking at log files.
So far this has been good for me to monitor which steps users were reaching into the funnel + where they left & what caused delays.

doctor_m · Answer

Is your question asking about how to understand who's visiting your site and what their motivations are without engaging in creepy, dragnet-style tracking?

anotheryou · Answer

If you need to track individuals: don't record any personal data and a short keep-alive of sessions/ids of just 20 minutes.The biggest risk is that with this you are building infrastructure to do more "malicious" tracking easily. Alternatively use logs/server sided events only I guess.

mark_l_watson · Answer

I use an nginx plugin to count page hits per day, with no recording of user data, IP addresses, etc.

zzo38computer · Answer

Server log files. It already works by itself, and no client-side code is involved!

rogerkirkness · Answer

If you fire an event each time a page is loaded that can be helpful and basic to implement.

stephenr · Answer

Analyse the access logs of your web server/cache layer.This was a solved problem 20 years ago.

Which is the least invasive way of tracking usage on a website?

Is your question asking about how to understand who's visiting your site and what their motivations are without engaging in creepy, dragnet-style tracking?

If you need to track individuals: don't record any personal data and a short keep-alive of sessions/ids of just 20 minutes.
The biggest risk is that with this you are building infrastructure to do more "malicious" tracking easily. Alternatively use logs/server sided events only I guess.

I use an nginx plugin to count page hits per day, with no recording of user data, IP addresses, etc.

Server log files. It already works by itself, and no client-side code is involved!

If you fire an event each time a page is loaded that can be helpful and basic to implement.

Analyse the access logs of your web server/cache layer.
This was a solved problem 20 years ago.