
<Image
  publicId="newsletters/data-driven-decisions-product-analytics/cover"
  alt="Breaking the cycle: Data-driven product decisions"
/>

Ever catch yourself navigating around a clunky feature or long-standing bug in an app you use? Chances are, you're so used to it, you've forgotten it's a problem.

Guess what: Product teams feel the same frustration. I've been there myself, stuck in a cycle of building features that don't quite hit the mark.

Why does this disconnect between users and product teams exist? It boils down to a few common pitfalls:

- Emotional decision paralysis: Even minor changes feel overwhelming.
- Designers and PMs sometimes get emotionally wrapped in their work, making it hard to let go of past decisions, even when user behavior suggests they should.
- Corporate Red Tape: In large companies, decision-making can be painfully, heart-breakingly slow.

The way out of this cycle? Data. It helps us cut through the emotional and bureaucratic fog to make changes that actually matter.

## Using data to make informed product decisions

At my company [Craftwork](https://craftwork.com), we've been using data to iterate on critical user paths and features. In particular our workflow for a self-serve, instant interior painting quote has gone through several iterations.

Although we haven't reached product design nirvana quite yet, we've learned a lot along the way. At its core, the process boils down to a couple critical steps:

### Understand signal _and_ noise: Measuring Drop-off Rates

It's critical to understand how people are interacting with your product. This is where analytics tools come in handy. We use [PostHog](https://posthog.com/) to track behavior. During the interior paint quote flow, there are a steps that we measure as inflection points for customer drop-off. At each point, we keep track of customer behaviors by logging an event.

For example, when a potential customer selects a room to paint, we log an event like this:

```javascript
posthog.capture('estimate/room-selected', { roomName: 'Living Room' });
```

We can then use PostHog to track the number of people who reach each step in the flow. As you might imagine, the first step in the process sees the most activity/ The very last step in the process is when someone clicks the submit button and sends us a request to have their home painted. In between the two, there are several steps that potential customers complete.

<Image
  publicId="newsletters/data-driven-decisions-product-analytics/funnel"
  alt="Screenshot of a funnel created in PostHog"
  caption="An example of a funnel created in PostHog, from their docs site"
/>

At each point in the timeline, we see two things: the number of people who continue to the next step, and the number of people who drop off.

This helps us understand where people are dropping off -- in other words, where we're losing potential customers. At each of these steps, there's an opportunity to improve conversion rates by iterating on our design.

### One Step at a Time: Hypothesis-Driven Iterations

This gives us data to make informed decisions about the product without getting too wrapped up in what we _feel_ should change. For example, if we see a lot of people dropping off at the step where they select paint colors, we might try a few things:

- Reduce the number of colors to choose from
- Add a "recommended" color
- Remove the color selection step entirely

(Any guesses what we landed on? If you're in Charlotte, NC, you can [try it out](https://craftwork.com/estimate/interior) and see for yourself!

We can then the impact of each change by seeing how the drop-off rate at that step is affected. If we see a significant improvement in drop-off rate, we know we're on the right track.

If not, we can try something else.

This is a simple example, but it illustrates the power of data-driven decision making. Ideally, this is paired with hands-on user research, and learnings from both proactive and reactive customer support. But even with a small team, you can make a big impact by using data to inform your product decisions.

---

## Tools for product analytics

- As mentioned above, we use [PostHog](https://posthog.com/) to track critical user behaviors, and to build funnels for measuring drop-off rates.
- [Highlight](https://www.highlight.io/) pitches itself as a full-stack monitoring platform. It's handy for keeping an eye on errors and performance issues within your app, and is completely self-hostable.
- [Fathom Analytics](https://usefathom.com/ref/DPSSYB) (that's a referral link for $10 off your first invoice) - I've written about [fathom](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/why-fathom-analytics) [several times now](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/seo-tools-for-new-web-projects), and I stand by my recommendation. It's great!

---

## More from my slice of the internet this week

- 🎙️ [Making React 70% faster with Aiden Bai of Million.js](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2023/09/05/making-react-70-faster/) - I had a chat with Aiden recently for an episode of the Software Engineering Daily podcast. Aiden is a recent high school grad who's built a React alternative that's 70% faster than React. ...I know, right?!
- 🧸 [Smartbear Acquires Stoplight](https://apisyouwonthate.com/newsletter/smartbear-acquires-stoplight/) - the most recent newsletter from APIs You Won't Hate talks about a recent acquisition in the API devtools world.


Breaking the cycle: Data-driven product descisions


I hope you're well.

I've been continuing my habit of getting out with the sunrise each day for a walk. I've been covering 4-5mi each morning. By my count, today I'll hit a 62 day streak, so if you're playing along at home, that's about 250mi I've traipsed through my neighborhood since this whole shutdown started. It's given me lots of time to work through my thoughts and feelings on everything going on in the world.​

<Image
  publicId="newsletters/swear-i-wrote-that-down-somewhere/cover"
  alt="A photo of light rail tracks and a water tower, with a light colored sunrise in the background."
  caption="A shot from a recent morning stroll, in Charlotte NC's South End district"
/>

## Brain training

_Write more!_

I'm trying to write more in general, and I'm starting by taking better notes. Part of that process is writing down things that I think about or come across each day, if they pique my attention in any way.

If you've crossed the same parts of the internet as I have, you may have heard about [Roam Research](https://roamresearch.com/) - a fairly brutalist note-taking tool which helps you see how your thoughts are linked together. I've been using it for a few months now, and while I'm not quite addicted to the thing, I absolutely see the value in continued use. They've had a tremendous amount of adoption lately. Last weekend, they saw 10k users register, which all but shut down their service. That's a hell of a success story!

## If you make things for the web...

- 📈 I put out a new article last week on why I adopted Fathom Analytics for my personal site (and a few other projects). If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, [give it a look here](https://www.mikebifulco.com/posts/why-fathom-analytics).
- 🔨 Have you tried out [Gatsby's incremental builds yet](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/blog/2020-04-22-announcing-incremental-builds/)? I've given it a go on both Netlify and Gatsby Cloud, and I've gotta say, I'm impressed.
- 🎨 Designing software with accessibility in mind is more important every day - and I've really enjoyed watching the growth of a product called [Stark](https://www.getstark.co/), which helps teams meet accessibility standards.

## Never stop learning

- 🥬 Unlike most commodities in the US during the pandemic, asparagus has become harder to source, and so its [price has gone up drastically](https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/05/07/Asparagus-price-bucks-norm-spikes-during-coronavirus-pandemic/5101588800054/).
- 📚 On any given day, the average person reads 113 thousand words(!). Cognition is the process of acquiring knowledge, and it's been capturing my attention lately. Check out this [great twitter thread from Kyle Harrison](https://twitter.com/kwharrison13/status/1257817073868107776) about how much we read, and some compelling thoughts on
- 🇬🇧 Did you know London is divided into 32 boroughs? I sure didn't. [Jay Foreman's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T_0FYHn0I0) explaining what makes them all unique and strange is about as witty and British as one could hope for.

<hr />

Thanks for reading Tiny Improvements. If you've got any feedback, my inbox is always open: [hello@mikebifulco.com​](mailto:hello@mikebifulco.com)

Be excellent to each other -

Mike


I swear I wrote that down somewhere 🤦‍♂️


## SEO & analytics help grow site traffic

Whether you're working on your own blog, a news site, or building a product, you _absolutely must_ care about your site's SEO. If your site is not optimized for search engines, it is harder to find, leading to fewer visitors and potential customers. SEO tools can help you improve the usability of your site, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for.

These are the tools that I use to monitor and enhance my sites' performance. The can help you build a site that is easier to find and use, too.

## ahrefs webmaster tools

You only need to spend a few moments researching SEO online before ahrefs pops up _somewhere_ in your results. In addition to their incredible [blog](https://ahrefs.com/blog/) and [studies](https://ahrefs.com/blog/category/data-studies/) on how search works on the web, they provide a fantastic suite of free tools for monitoring and improviing the SEO on your sites.

<Image
  publicId="posts/seo-tools-for-new-projects/ahrefs-audit"
  alt="Screenshot of a weekly audit email from ahrefs - showing a 100 SEO score for mikebifulco.com, with a few warnings."
  caption="There's always room to improve SEO, and ahrefs webmaster tools makes it easy to digest"
/>

I have found [ahrefs webmaster tools](https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools) to be absolutely invaluable in keeping an eye on my sites' content. Once you register a free account and verify that you have control of the sites you want to monitor, ahrefs will kick off a weekly audit of all the pages on your domain. It will check for common pitfalls, and give your site a health score from 0-100. If you're a dev, it may be helpful to think of it as a linter for SEO.

I've used it to find and fix countless problems with my sites, from broken links to missing Canonical URLs, removing unnecessary redirects and finding opportunities to link existing articles to one another.

You will get weekly audit reports in email, which let you know when things change - this can be helpful in situations where things out of your control end up affecting your site. Ever had someone take down an article that you link to? Ahrefs will find it.

## Google Search Console

My adoption of [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console/about) come from what I learned taking Monica Lent's [Blogging for Devs](https://bloggingfordevs.com) course.

Google Search Console gives you reports on how and when people see your site pop up in Google Search results. Note that it won't track people _on your site_ like Google Analytics and Fathom do - just your performance in search. This is a useful litmus for your site's organic growth and authority. If you're investing in sharing your expertise and building a searchable site, your performance on Google Search Console should grow over time. In other words, you can see whether you're gaining traction via SEO or not.

To get started, you'll need to register your site with the Google Search Console. Verifying your ownership takes a few quick steps, and doesn't require you to add Google Analytics (which is helpful if, like me, you've chosen [Fathom](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/why-fathom-analytics) for its privacy-first features).

Best of all, it's free! Just register and follow instructions to add a DNS record, or upload a file to a specific place to verify that you own the site you're interested in monitoring. You should make sure to have a sitemap on your site - they're easy to generate, and worth the time to get right. This is what Google's crawlers primarily use to index your articles for search results.

I use the Search Console to make decisions about things to write about next, and track the progress of my site over time. At the moment, Google will keeps 16 months of your site's traffic history around for you to analyze, but that history starts once you've registered you site with the Search Console. So, the sooner you get set up, the better!

## Fathom Analytics

[Fathom](https://usefathom.com) is privacy first analytics for the web. According to their site, _Fathom is a Google Analytics alternative that doesn’t compromise visitor privacy for data. We revolutionized website analytics by making them easy to use and respectful of privacy laws (like GDPR and more)._

If you've never paid attention analytics for your web properties, Fathom will be a revelation - it's super useful to have an understanding of which pages on your site are getting traffic, where that traffic is coming from, and what times of day are most busy.

If you've used Google Analytics in the past, you may be surprised just how freeing it is to use an analytics tool that prioritizes analytics. You _really_ don't need to know _who_ is on a given page - instead, focusing on the content on your site which is being visited, and the journey readers take to get there is a super useful tool to have when you're researching and writing new articles.

It's great, and puts your readers' privacy first. Google's advantage is quickly vanishing due to new regulations, and privacy tools that are being built into browsers and operating systems. Fathom does a great job of providing value without fishing for every minute detail about your readers.

Fathom is lightweight and ridiculously easy to use. The Fathom team provides docs for a variety of platforms and JAMstack site builders, including [Gatsby](https://usefathom.com/docs/integrations/gatsby), [ConvertKit](https://usefathom.com/docs/integrations/convertkit), [Next.js](https://usefathom.com/docs/integrations/next), [Vue](https://usefathom.com/docs/integrations/vue), [Webflow](https://usefathom.com/docs/integrations/webflow), [Wordpress](https://usefathom.com/docs/integrations/wordpress), and quite a few more.

I've written a bit about my experiences with Fathom before. You may want to check out my other articles, including: [Why I switched to Fathom for Analytics](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/why-fathom-analytics) and [How to add Fathom Analytics to your Remix.run app](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/add-fathom-analytics-to-remix)

### Self-host Fathom for free - Fathom Lite

If you're hesitant to pay for Fathom, they do also provide an open source version called [Fathom Lite](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom) - you'll need to configure and host it yourself, but it should give you an idea of what Fathom's premiums service is like.

If you're interested in trying out Fathom's paid service, use my [**referral link**](https://usefathom.com/ref/DPSSYB) for a discount to get you started.

## Cloudflare

I use [Cloudflare](https://cloudflare.com) to manage the DNS records for all of my sites. In addition to having a _really_ straightforward UI for DNS management, they offer a host of other features to keep your sites running well. This includes automated protection for DDoS attacks, maintenance mode, and performance enhancements such as origin server optimization and caching.

Cloudflare provides a [Free Tier](https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/) that will work for most personal sites. You'll need to set up an account, look for the instructions to add your domain to your Cloudflare account, and then update your DNS settings as needed.

Because I own domains from a variety of registrars, it's really nice to be able to manage DNS for all of them in one place. They also provide a ton of other great dev tools, like [Cloudflare Workers](https://workers.cloudflare.com/), which you can use to add interactivity to your site.

## F5Bot

<Image
  publicId="posts/seo-tools-for-new-projects/f5bot"
  alt="Screenshot of f5bot.com - get an email for when you're mentioned online!"
  caption="F5bot is free, and dead simple to set up. "
/>

The pitch for [f5bot](https://f5bot.com) is simple - as they say, it is a service that will help you to "Get an email when you're mentioned online!".

It's completely free, and takes just moments to set up - you just need to create an account, and set up keywords for the service to track. When your keywords are mentioned on [Reddit](https://reddit.com), [Hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com), or [Lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs), you'll get a tidy little email in your inbox.

<Image
  publicId="posts/seo-tools-for-new-projects/f5bot-notification "
  alt="screenshot of a notification from f5bot in my gmail inbox. It's a simple plaintext email with a link to an article on mikebifulco.com that was mentioned on Reddit."
  caption="This is what typical notification from f5bot looks like."
/>

Notifications come _very_ quickly - in my experience, I see them within minutes of my sites being mentioned online. This is hugely helpful because it allows you to respond quickly, strike up a conversation, and make a connection with the people who are sharing your work. Those connections are the backbone of building a great personal brand online.

You can set up any search keyword you want, so if there's a competitor or topic that you're hoping to keep an eye on, it's great for that, too.

Overall, I highly recommend [f5bot](https://f5bot.com) - it's an incredibly useful tool, it's free, and it couldn't be easier to set up.

## Related reading

If you're going on the SEO-improvement journey for your sites, you might find these helpful:

- [Why I switched to Fathom for Analytics](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/why-fathom-analytics)
- [How to add Fathom Analytics to your Remix.run app](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/add-fathom-analytics-to-remix)
- [Don't center-align paragraph text](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/dont-center-paragraph-text) - this is utterly unrelated to SEO, but c'mon, do better.
- [SEO for Devs](https://seofordevs.com) - I absolutely cannot recommend this **free course** enough. Monica Lent has a masterful understanding of SEO, and I've learned a ton from her over the years.


SEO tools I used to grow my sites to 20k+ visitors/month


Building a website using the Remix.run web app framework? This tutorial will teach you how to add privacy-first analytics to your Remix site with Fathom.

## How to set up Fathom on your Remix site

1. Sign into your account with [Fathom](https://usefathom.com/login), and create a new site.
2. Open the settings for that site, and look for _Script settings_. Hit the clipboard icon to copy the Script tag for your site.

   <Image
     publicId="posts/add-fathom-analytics-to-remix/script-settings"
     alt="Script settings for one of my sites on Fathom's dashboard"
     caption="You site's embed code will be on the script settings page. Hit the clipboard button to copy the code"
   />

3. Open up your Remix site in your IDE of choice. open `root.tsx` (or `root.jsx` if you're using JavaScript instead of TypeScript), and paste your embed code right before the `<Script />` tag:

```jsx
return (
  <html lang="en">
    <head>
      <Meta />
      <Links />
    </head>
    <body>
      <Layout>
        <Outlet />
      </Layout>
      <ScrollRestoration />

      <script
        src="https://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js"
        data-site="TRSSCIOR"
        defer
      />
      <Scripts />
      <LiveReload />
    </body>
  </html>
);
```

<small>
  
  _Note: ☝🏽 I've edited the `<script>` tag here to be self closing, rather than having `<script></script>`. It should work either way._

</small>

4. Start your site with `npm run dev` or `yarn dev` and visit any page (you may have to hit reload if you had the page open already). You should see this reflected in your fathom dashboard in real time!
   <Image
     publicId="posts/add-fathom-analytics-to-remix/tracking-results"
     alt="You'll know it's working when you see a live visitor on your fathom dashboard"
     caption="You'll know it's working when you see a live visitor on your fathom dashboard"
   />

## Try out Fathom - it's great!

I've been using Fathom for years, and am a happy paying customer. If you'd like to give it a shot, you can get $10 off of Fathom when you **use my referral link [https://usefathom.com/ref/DPSSYB](https://usefathom.com/ref/DPSSYB)** to get started.

## If you enjoyed this video

- I wrote a post when I initially adopted fathom, called [Why I switched to Fathom for analytics](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/why-fathom-analytics)
- Make sure to [subscribe to my YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/mikebifulco)


How to add Fathom Analytics to your Remix.run app


This morning, I fully switched my personal site from Google Analytics to [Fathom](https://usefathom.com/) - something that I had been considering for a while, and finally decided to go all in on. Thanks to my colleagues [@andrewpmiller](https://twitter.com/andrewpmiller) and [@jeremias](https://twitter.com/jeremias) for planting this seed months ago - I'm glad I finally made the switch.

## What is Fathom?

In their words, Fathom is "simple analytics for website owners & businesses". Near as I can tell, that's a perfect distillation of what they've built. Fathom provides an easily digestible single page analytics view of your site's traffic.

It's a service that rids you of some of the heft of having Google watch you and your users' every move. They're open and transparent about being [Privacy First](https://usefathom.com/privacy) - something which has long since melted away from Google's ethos.

In addition to giving you information about the traffic coming and going from your web property, fathom also lets you set goals for your site traffic - so that you can keep an eye on performance of what matters to you. Maybe you want to see how many people are visiting your "about me" page, or track newsletter subscriptions -- with Fathom, it's a straightforward javascript call to make that happen.

## Why Fathom?

For me, the functionality it provides is perfect - [my personal site](https://mikebifulco.com) is slowly growing in traffic, which is great! I had been using Google Analytics to keep an eye on my site's traffic, but honestly - I spent a disproportionate amount of time getting lost in all of the bells and whistles of GA. That time wasn't giving me more usable insight... I was just getting lost in the tool.

I also love the idea of Privacy First tooling, which Fathom hits out of the park. When you visit my site, I'm not keeping any of your PII, or doing anything creepy with your browsing behavior. I just want to know how various articles perform, so that I can make better decisions about what to write in the future.

Another benefit was the install process - getting Fathom set up was a breeze. You may know that my site is built on [Gatsby](https://gatsbyjs.org/) - it turns out there's a reasonably well-featured [plugin for gatsby](https://github.com/lgraubner/gatsby-plugin-fathom) created by a member of the community. In addition to that, they're reportedly shipping their own plugin in the next few weeks.

<Tweet tweetLink="usefathom/status/1256954976238055424" align="center" />

<Aside>
  Note: it looks like in the coming weeks, Fathom will be providing their own
  Gatsby plugin!
</Aside>

## Looking for a free option?

**Fathom also has a self-hosted product** called "[fathom lite](https://github.com/usefathom/fathom)" which you can run yourself if you want to use their service for free. It isn't as full-featured as full blown fathom, but it will give you a good idea of what you're in for. I set it up on Heroku (using [these instructions](https://gist.github.com/gmolveau/78f88af3f5951ba6e093f93a07caa302)) for a few weeks before deciding to take the plunge and pay for Fathom's SaaS service.

## Try it yourself!

Thinking about giving it a whirl? One of the perks of being a Fathom customer is their affiliate program - you can use my link to [sign up for Fathom](https://usefathom.com/ref/DPSSYB) for a $10 discount on your first invoice. Sweet!


#analytics: 5 posts tagged

Breaking the cycle: Data-driven product descisions

SEO tools I used to grow my sites to 20k+ visitors/month

How to add Fathom Analytics to your Remix.run app

I swear I wrote that down somewhere 🤦‍♂️

Why I switched to Fathom for web analytics