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Why Fugu doesn't track unique users
by
Can Olcer
https://fugu.lol/why-fugu-doesnt-track-unique-users/
I absolutely love this project. I think it’s a great interpretation of product analytics. Really what we’re looking for for is to better understand user behaviour and see how we can use this understanding to improve user experience. This is all event driven.
Have bookmarked this and will keep it in mind if I think I can use it on anything. Thanks for sharing! It’s great to see more indie hackers building privacy-friendly tools. 😀
Thanks, Will! Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or suggestions once you give Fugu a spin :-)
Love to see that someone is doing this with Ruby on Rails! 🚀
Rails is my one true love (sorry @dorena 😅). The Rails philosophy matches great with my personal opinions, I like the direction it's going with Rails 7, and it just makes you productive like no other framework/language combination I've tried so far.
😳
One of the key aspects that sets Fugu apart from other product analytics tools is that it doesn't track unique users, not even anonymously.
I think a lot of people's initial reaction to this is fear. Fear that they might miss insights. They couldn't be more wrong.
You already get a ton of insights without tracking unique users, and the little incremental insight you would get is not worth the privacy trade-off. Tracking unique users will not make or break your product.
One of my goals with Fugu is to push forward towards a more privacy-friendly web, and I think not tracking unique users is a corner stone of this.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
Thank you!
<3
Why do you feel that way? If you're able to track users, you'd be able to see what channels they are coming from, or where they are concentrated. If your app is appealing to a certain geographic area, but not another, this could be useful info to know.
I understand you see not tracking users as a differentiator of your product - but why is it really preferable for the founder? I see the benefit for the users, they aren't tracked, but not sure how founders really win from this. Open to hear your thoughts though.
I agree. All I'm saying is that you don't need to track unique users to get that information. Fugu tracks events, it just doesn't associate events with unique users.
Well, for many websites, counting events don't make a lot of sense. We often want to see where the users come from, how many from different referrals. It's very hard (maybe even impossible) to count them if you don't know if an IP is unique or not.
Like, okay, I know today users make 100 clicks on my website. Each event can be associated with a referral, so I also know that 30 referrals are associated with A, 70 with B. I can give me some information about the referrals but it will be way less precise because people are doing something on a website their behavior can be affected by many parameters.
Also, how can the event help with knowing where are my users located? Which countries? cities?
One more point. I found that tracking IPs can prevent the hackers' attacks as you can blacklist those who are coming from an IP trying to explode your website. (But it has nothing to do with analytics but explains why founders may want to know their visitors' IPs).
I think you are referring to web analytics, not product analytics.
Product analytics is a event-based tracking, and concerned with how users use your mobile or web app. Web analytics is page-based tracking, and concerned with how users navigate your website and where they were referred from.
But also with web analytics, tracking users is not necessary at all. There are great examples like Plausible that offer more than enough insights without tracking IP addresses or setting cookies.
One of the most important aspects of analytics is new vs returning users. If all your users are new, you have 100% churn and no chance of survival. If you have a high percentage of returning users, all you have to do is put a lot of effort into acquisition, and you're good. New vs returning is vital in figuring your next action.
I disagree that this is one of the most important aspects. I don't think it's worth opening the Pandora's box of tracking unique users just to get this benefit.
In reality, you will have a good feel of how well your users are retaining without knowing the exact percentage. We need to get away from this 100% data driven way of building products.
Well, I'm just one of your potential clients giving feedback. Others won't, they will just leave silently, unless you convince them to forget about what they learned on many startup blogs.
In my particular case, I'm pretty sure that my users don't care about cookies, and I sure know that churn rate is perhaps the most important aspect for me. Note that I'm not saying about the others, I'm sure there are target audiences to care enough to choose the right SaaS based on their cookie handling.
Yes, thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it. I didn't mean to come across as dismissive.
My target group are more privacy-conscious folks, and I'm aware that it's not a need for a lot people.
But it's already great that it enables exactly this kind of discussions and furthers the conversation around privacy and tracking.