Most founders track everything and learn nothing. Page views, bounce rates, scroll depth, time on site — none of it tells you why people leave or what makes them pay. Page views don't pay bills. Feature usage does.
Pick three to five events that map to money or retention. Track those. Ignore the rest until you have enough data on the ones that count.
Every product funnel collapses to four steps. Track one event per step:
Concrete examples for each event:
- Signup — fires when account creation completes, not when the form opens
- Core Action — the one thing your product is for. Sent message, exported file, completed task, generated report. One event.
- Payment Attempt — fires when the user clicks Subscribe or Buy, even if checkout fails. Failed payments tell you about pricing friction.
Pick PostHog if you want session replay and feature flags later. Pick Plausible or Umami if you want privacy-friendly and dead-simple. Don't pick three at once.
Add the snippet to your site. Wire one event per day if you have to. Trigger each event yourself by performing the action, then verify it appears in the dashboard. If it doesn't fire when you do it, it won't fire when a real user does.
You're not looking for vanity numbers. You're looking for the gap between two events.
Bad: "We had 1,200 page views this week."
Good: "60 signed up, 12 hit the core action, 1 reached payment. The drop is between signup and first use."
That gap is your next problem to solve. Without analytics, you'd guess. With analytics, you know where to look.
- Tracking 30 events on day one. Three is enough. Add more once these are clean.
- Obsessing over page views and bounce rate. They don't predict revenue.
- Skipping the manual test. Untested events lie silently for weeks.
- Building a dashboard before you have data. The default views are fine for now.
Install one analytics tool. Wire signup, core action, and payment attempt as events. Test each one yourself before you call it done.
Three to five events firing reliably on the actions that map to retention and revenue. You can open the dashboard and see your own test data appear within seconds.
Most founders track everything and learn nothing. Page views, bounce rates, scroll depth, time on site — none of it tells you why people leave or what makes them pay. Page views don't pay bills. Feature usage does.
Pick three to five events that map to money or retention. Track those. Ignore the rest until you have enough data on the ones that count.
Every product funnel collapses to four steps. Track one event per step:
Concrete examples for each event:
- Signup — fires when account creation completes, not when the form opens
- Core Action — the one thing your product is for. Sent message, exported file, completed task, generated report. One event.
- Payment Attempt — fires when the user clicks Subscribe or Buy, even if checkout fails. Failed payments tell you about pricing friction.
Pick PostHog if you want session replay and feature flags later. Pick Plausible or Umami if you want privacy-friendly and dead-simple. Don't pick three at once.
Add the snippet to your site. Wire one event per day if you have to. Trigger each event yourself by performing the action, then verify it appears in the dashboard. If it doesn't fire when you do it, it won't fire when a real user does.
You're not looking for vanity numbers. You're looking for the gap between two events.
Bad: "We had 1,200 page views this week."
Good: "60 signed up, 12 hit the core action, 1 reached payment. The drop is between signup and first use."
That gap is your next problem to solve. Without analytics, you'd guess. With analytics, you know where to look.
- Tracking 30 events on day one. Three is enough. Add more once these are clean.
- Obsessing over page views and bounce rate. They don't predict revenue.
- Skipping the manual test. Untested events lie silently for weeks.
- Building a dashboard before you have data. The default views are fine for now.
Install one analytics tool. Wire signup, core action, and payment attempt as events. Test each one yourself before you call it done.
Three to five events firing reliably on the actions that map to retention and revenue. You can open the dashboard and see your own test data appear within seconds.