A Short Note on Website Analytics
I've updated the Kanora website to use Plausible for analytics, and it seemed worth writing down exactly what that means because "privacy-friendly analytics" can sound reassuring without actually telling you very much.
What I want from the website is very small in scope. I want to know whether people are finding Kanora, which pages they read, whether a blog post travels a bit further than usual, and whether there is any real interest in the project beyond my own screen. It is genuinely nice to know that people are paying attention, but that is more or less the full extent of it.
What I track on the site is aggregate information:
- Page views
- Roughly which pages people visit
- Referrers, such as whether a visit came from search, social, or a link elsewhere
- Country-level location
- Browser and device type
What I do not want is personal data, user profiles, cross-site tracking, advertising identifiers, or a system built around figuring out who you are and what else you do online. I do not care about building audiences in that sense, and I do not want Kanora to depend on that logic.
That is why I chose Plausible. It is not free, and I am fine with that. There is usually a reason the biggest analytics platforms cost nothing up front, and I would rather pay a small monthly bill for simple audience measurement than treat surveillance as the normal price of running a website.
The app itself remains a separate thing. Kanora does not have accounts, does not upload your library, and does not track your listening habits. This change is only about the marketing site, where a basic sense of overall interest is useful while the project is still taking shape in public.
If you visit this site, the only thing I am really trying to learn is whether Kanora is resonating with people at all, and if it is, which parts of the story are landing. That feels like a reasonable thing to measure. Anything more invasive than that does not.