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!)

To everyone in this kingdom and beyond,
Cheers,
Leo
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