I don't know which analytics tool to use
Published on 14 May 2025
Leo writes:
I don’t track you, I just want to know how many people read my blog posts.
Those were the words on my mind last night. I wanted to see if I was writing something that people really read, or if I was just talking to myself.
I can be a dev, an engineer, front end, full stack— but at the end of the day, I’m a storyteller more than any of those things. And the stories I want to tell are the ones that I’m passionate about.
Problem is…
I don’t know if people are reading what I write.
Not even when I was so deep in the rabbit hole of office politics, I had this feeling that I was just talking to myself.
And all of that because I don’t know which analytics tool to use. Or at least, I did not know.
The Initial Solution
As someone who imagines code fairly easily, I thought: “How hard can it be to implement a Redis-based analytics system?”
I’m not even kidding. I thought: “I’ll just use Redis. It’s easy. I’ll just use the Vercel Redis integration and… poof”.
Well, it turns out that it’s not that easy.
Even Upstash does facilitate a bit of the bottlenecks when it comes to the number of requests per minute, I didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of writing a Redis client and maybe creating a route in Next.js to handle the analytics.
…So I dropped this idea even before it could see the light of day.
(Maybe) a Better Solution?
One solution would be to use a third-party analytics tool like PostHog or Google Analytics.
But come on, both PostHog and Google Analytics are… well, too much for a simple blog. That’s like using a Kubernetes cluster to host a static HTML page. I’m not chasing leads or building conversion funnels. I’m not trying to A/B test your soul.
I just want to know how many people read what I write.
Enter Vercel Analytics
I’ve been using Vercel for a while now, and I have received a few emails about the Vercel Analytics tool.
But I always ignored.
Why? Because Vercel sells a product, and I’m kind of sceptical about people selling products. For those of you who use Vercel, did you know there’s an “Analytics” tab in the dashboard? Yeah, there is. I thought so much that that was a premium feature for paying customers that I never even bothered to click it— yeah, to click it.
And when, after 4 hours, and one ridiculous attempt of self-hosting a Plausible community edition. (Yeah, I’m not kidding. I’m not even kidding. I did try that.)
I finally decided to give it a shot and click on that bloody “Analytics” tab.
And I’m glad I did.
Here’s the entire code I wrote to implement Vercel Analytics on this blog:
// ...
import { Analytics } from '@vercel/analytics/next';
export default function Layout({ children }: LayoutProps): JSX.Element {
return (
<html>
<body>
{children}
<Analytics />
</body>
</html>
)
}You wanna see the best part?
It’s free-ish.
I mean, I can look at the number of views on my blog posts, bounce rate, location (country/city), and browser in the last 30 days.
And that’s more than enough for me.
Lesson of the day: Don’t be afraid to do the easy thing (and click the bloody tab!)
For more from this site, browse the full blog—or jump to Tailwind in anger and why engineering still matters with AI.
Leo