Know If Anyone's Actually Using It

Once your app is live, one question starts nagging: is anyone using this?

Refreshing the page hoping to feel something is not a measurement. Analytics is just writing down what happens so you can stop guessing.

What is worth measuring

For a small app, four things tell you nearly everything:

• Visits — how many people arrived, and on which pages.
• Where they came from — a search engine, a link someone posted, or typed directly.
• What they clicked — especially the one button that matters most.
• What broke — errors real visitors hit, which ties straight back to stage 14.

That is enough to answer the real questions: is anyone here, where from, and do they do the thing.

You do not have to spy on people

Most analytics you have heard of works by following individuals around: a cookie — a small file stored in the browser — that recognizes the same person across sites and over time. That is what cookie-consent banners are apologizing for.

There is another way, and for a small app it is plenty. Instead of an identity, the server briefly uses the visitor's network address to make a scrambled code for the day, then throws the address away. The code changes tomorrow, so the same person cannot be linked from one day to the next.

You get honest visitor counts. Nobody gets followed. And with no personal data stored, there is no consent banner to add — which visitors like at least as much as you do.

The Playground's analytics add-on works this way, with one further twist: the data lands in your storage rather than a vendor's. It is an optional paid add-on — free during the beta — while the rest of the Playground stays free.

What this honestly cannot tell you

The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly. Because the code rotates daily, you can count daily unique visitors — but you cannot follow one person across days. So questions like "how many of last month's visitors came back?" are not answerable this way.

For most small apps that is a fine trade. If tracking individuals over months is essential to what you are building, you would need a different approach — and a consent banner, and a much longer conversation about privacy.

Numbers change decisions, or ignore them

Before adding a measurement, ask what you would do differently depending on the answer. If there is no answer to that, you are collecting a number to feel busy.

Good: "if nobody clicks the sign-up button, I will move it." Bad: "it would be interesting to know the average session length."

One honest use, once you have real numbers: they become evidence. Which is exactly what the last stage of this phase is about.