Taking a Simple Approach to Analytics

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Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. My name is Eric Karkovac, and I'm your host. Today's guest is Danny Van Kooten. He's the founder of IberaCode, which is a European software company. And you may know him from some very popular WordPress plugins, such as MailChimp for WordPress. and Cocoa Analytics. Danny, welcome to the WP Minute. Thank you, Eric. I'm happy to be here. So...

I want to get into Cocoa Analytics. I kind of want to dive into that. But first, I read your bio, and we'll put a link to this in the show notes. But you have a very unique story about how you started with creating WordPress plugins. Apparently, you were... recovering from appendicitis. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I had this idea to create a WordPress plugin and I had it in my head for about...

Five years, but never actually went for it because I was so busy working for clients and just making a living. But then... I was on holiday in Vietnam and I was hospitalized with appendicitis. So I had like 10 days of bed rest and it was a great force.

which allowed me to start some long-term projects. It's kind of amazing how something like that, I mean, no one wants to get appendicitis, obviously, and especially not while you're visiting another country. I can only imagine how uncomfortable that must have been, but you turned it in.

something very positive. And I see that MailChimp for WordPress has over 2 million active installs. So congratulations on that. That's quite an accomplishment. Thank you. I've been very happy with the appendicitis just because of what came out of it. I just know for sure that otherwise I would never have taken the time because I've already been meaning to do it for five years and never went for it.

And even the hospital, I had a great time. Everything went fine as soon as I knew what was actually going on with me. So, yeah, I'm just very happy that... It happens. You never know when something like that is going to change your life for the better, right? Very, very different way to start getting into plugins. So, I mean, were you like freelancing before that? Yep.

I was freelancing and I think I've created a MailChimp sign up for like over five times or maybe 10 times. And I just have to keep doing the same thing. So I figured I should make a plugin for this. Never did it, obviously. Until the hospital happened and I finally got around to it. Well, I bet a lot of people are happy that you did that. I mean, two million active installs is quite something. And then, I don't know.

If you want to go into the genesis of Cocoa Analytics, how did you decide that was your next project after MailChimp for WordPress took off? I've had a few. Plugins in between, which did quite well, but not on the scale of MailChimp for WordPress, but about maybe 50,000 users at most. One for pop-ups that I'm not so proud of anymore. One for contact forms.

I think I did a toy project. I was trying to learn a new programming language back in 2016. And I used it to build an analytics product. And then two years later, I think, GDPR. It came into effect here in Europe. So the topic was quite hot. And I started FATM Analytics. I'm not sure if you've heard of it. It's quite popular nowadays, but I think we grew it to about...

500 or maybe 1,000 monthly users. But I became a new dad during his first year. And then during the second year, my second daughter was born. And it was just very hard to struggle. So I got out of the project and it continued with another founder stepping into my place. And it's been doing very well after that as well. So it was...

Well, I've had some mixed feelings seeing it grow without me, obviously, but I couldn't let the topic go completely either. So that's where I started Coco Analytics, just focusing on WordPress users. And also... Go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah, one thing that I really didn't enjoy back then with Fatim was keeping everything online for our customers. I had no experience with it and it was just... quite stressful, especially if you're not sleeping because of your children. Yes, yes.

So I figured if I build it on top of WordPress, I can piggyback on all the amazing WordPress hosting out there and I don't have to deal with any hosting. I can just focus on... the code for recording and showing the data. Yeah, that makes sense. So, I mean, you had, with previous products, you had a server, I assume then that tracked all of this for your clients. And if that went down, I can only imagine...

the stress that is caused by that. Yeah, it was very stressful, especially, well, we had a lot of small clients, but as soon as we had a big client with millions of page views, Everything had to change and I just had to get behind the computer immediately to scale up the server. It was a manual thing back then, especially because we were growing at such a crazy pace that I couldn't do it correctly. In hindsight, I should have, but hey. you live, you learn.

Well, yeah, this is all a learning experience. And I think it seemed like a logical step to go to that next place, which is WordPress, which already is self-hosted. You don't have to worry about a server. You can focus on making the plugin simple to use, privacy friendly. I think is a huge deal these days. I mean, GDPR is very much a concern. Even here in America, we have to comply with it if we're serving European.

customers how did you decide on um wordpress though like what what drove you to that well initially fathom was an open source project um But after I left, I had no control over it, obviously. And they decided to turn it into a closed source product, which I think makes sense for them. But for me, the goal was never to make it a big commercial success, although it would be nice to make it sustainable. So I figured, how can I reach a large number of people and not have to deal with hosting people?

Well, WordPress is obviously a huge part of the internet. There's a lot of amazing hosting setups out there. And I had a lot of experience building on top of WordPress. So for me, it was quite... logical to build it on top of WordPress. And well, I obviously had to make some design choices as well because it's not that easy to store years worth of analytics data into a...

WordPress database but it happens that to be a great match with the privacy friendly aspect because if you're not storing all the visitor specific stuff then you can also build quite a good product on top of a WordPress database. Yeah, that is nice. And it's portable as well. You know, we move your site to another host. We still have all our analytical data, which is a big deal. I think...

You know, I've been on the web for many years, and Google Analytics has always kind of been that standard, right, for analytics. People kind of expect it these days. And yet... I don't know a single person who likes Google Analytics 4. Google's UI has become, at least in my opinion, very dense and very difficult to use. So when you're building out Cocoa Analytics...

Did you take a look at Google and kind of look at it and say, OK, this is where I need to improve on what Google does. This is where they fail and maybe I can make a positive impact. Yeah, well, to be brutally honest, I didn't look at Google Analytics at all because even back in my freelancing days,

My customers expected me to install Google Analytics on their site. But then when I came back to their sites months or years later, they never even looked at it even once. Or maybe they tried to, but they just couldn't find, like, how can I just see? the number of visitors because it's not on the front page of your analytics dashboard. It's buried three pages down or something like that. So I didn't really look at Google. I just wanted one page.

that gave you an overview of what happened on your site. So no custom reports, no multi-leveled pagers, just a single page showing visitors and sources. That makes sense, I think, because... I think the simplicity is what people are really after. We talk about Google Analytics, and you said as a freelancer, people want you to install it.

It's almost like an industry unto itself now that you have to be an expert at Google Analytics in order to set up the reports, in order to get the emails sent out, and just customize things to match what your clients are looking for. Cocoa Analytics is quite the opposite of that. You install it, you can see the stats right away. Our own Matt Medeiros did a little video tour of it recently, which we'll put in the show notes.

showing just basically you turn it on and it works. And of course, the pro version, you can create reports and things like that as well. But there's still like this expectation, right, that Google is going to be what's used. What advice would you have for like a freelancer or an agency whose client says, I really want Google Analytics, but as a freelancer, you're saying, well, I think Coco's probably the better option. What advice would you give to them?

Yeah, what I would really like people to do is like maybe start out with something simple like Cocoa Analytics because it covers a large number of use cases. Like if you just want to see what kind of traffic you're getting, whether it's increasing month over month and where it's coming from. I think is covering 80% of small business owners' websites or even private users.

I just want the default to be something simple, like as simple as it could be. And then over time, maybe your needs are becoming more advanced and you can always slap on something on top of Cocoa Analytics because it's so lightweight. it doesn't get in the way, it doesn't take up any space, and it's not slowing down your website. So it's easy to grow into more advanced uses. What we experienced with Coco is...

Usually when the default is not enough, they want custom events anyway. And even with Google Analytics, you will have to set that up. And with Cocoa Analytics, you can now track... any type of custom event as well. So even when your use case is more advanced, it can probably be done in a simpler way than you would have with Google Analytics. Yeah.

The other part of that is that you don't have to worry about Google changing their platform or making it, you know, more difficult. Yep. That's been a problem, too. I think, you know, just the switch from... Google Analytics 3 to 4. That was a hassle for a lot of website owners and especially, I think, agencies that had a lot of clients, you know, having to go through that.

A plugin like Coco, you're just basically hitting the update button when a new version comes out and, you know, everything still works, which I think is nice in an age where everything seems to be getting more complicated. It's a nice win.

One other thing that I remember from when I started Cocoa Analytics is, I think back in 2016, the Google Analytics tracking script was like 48 kilobytes after compression and minification. That's a crazy amount of JavaScript for initiating, well, maybe one or two HTTP requests to actually log the visitor.

With Cocoa Analytics, it's 500 bytes added to your pages and that's it. Yeah, the performance part of it is definitely important. I mean, I could even recall, I mean, I still see this with some sites I manage that. Even if you load up the browser console during analytics coming in, it litters your console with errors at times. It slows everything down. Sometimes you are waiting for the Google server to respond.

And so that kind of, you know, it's one of those, why is my website slow type of things? Well, analytics can definitely do that anytime you're making a third party call like that. So with Coco, everything, it really is just on your site. It's not. making third-party calls, right? Yep, and most likely there's already a connection open that can be reused for logging the visit. So yeah, it's really... I have a hard time believing it could be any faster than...

than this. Well, I noticed also that you went on to a standalone version for folks that aren't using WordPress. How is that going so far? Wow, I'm surprised you found it because...

I've not been putting it out there as much because I think the relationship between the standalone version and Coco Analytics can be a little weird. But I'm using it myself and I know of a... couple of people who are self hosting it and it's quite useful as well because you can host a single instance and you can use it to track multiple websites so for instance if you have a couple of wordpress sites but also a couple of

static websites or anything like that. You can use a similar looking interface for both of these sites. So I'm not sure if I'm going to make it like It's public. It's out there. It's open source. People can use it. It does require some more advanced setup in terms of deploying it to a server that you can actually use it on. It's definitely not as easy to use as Cocoa Analytics, the WordPress plugin.

But it can be used and it's really nice if you have non-Warepress websites, I think. That's neat. It's nice to have the familiar interface. I mean, I can see like an agency that has a server that maybe wants to set something like that up to track all of their clients in one. One go of it. But I thought that was an interesting side project. So I have to ask about AI because everything's AI now. So your product is very simple. It's very straightforward.

But we're also like in this age where everything is getting AI integrations. I have to ask, do you see any sort of AI integration coming to Coco? And maybe it's it's. Going the opposite way might actually be better. But what do you say about that? Yeah, well, if I have to be honest, personally, I'm getting quite fed up with everything turning into AI or...

For Cocoa Analytics, I'm not sure I see a use case except for maybe the surrounding products like the documentation that you can search or that you can use an AI chatbot to summarize it for you or to help you write. code snippets to track custom events or something like that so i can definitely see some use cases for it but in the product itself maybe to forecast projected visitor data but i'm not sure

Personally, I would rather keep it clear of any AI. Honestly, I'm happy to hear you say that. Really? I think we put it into so many places where... It's not really that useful. It's just more of a race to say, oh, I've added AI to this. OK, does it make it my job any easier? Does it give me information that I can't get? by just looking at the screen. Some of that stuff is just more of a marketing hype to me than it is useful for the user.

To give an example, like we're using help scouts to talk to our users. And like a year ago, they started pushing us to start using AI to talk to our users. And they also started pushing this to my team. And I told them like... Don't click it. Please don't use it. I want us to talk to our users ourselves and learn from them and use it to make the product better. I don't want to save any time on it because it's fine.

I like talking to users. I like learning from our users. And I definitely don't want to hand it over to a computer. My users probably get maybe a faster answer, but also a less accurate answer. If they want to use AI to learn something about Cocoa Analytics, they can, of course, do so. But if they start emailing us, I want them to be actually emailing with us like a human and not the AI.

You bring up a good point about just being able to learn from your users, right? I mean, how many, I'm just curious, what kind of things have you added to Coco just based on user requests or maybe you saw like a use case that you hadn't thought of before? Well, a lot of things like most things are actually coming from users because my own use case is quite limited. I don't really look at analysis data all that much. Most of the product as it is right now.

is what I learned from users, like they're using it in such a way they want to aggregate referrers on a hostname basis. They care about... which specific Google domain someone came from. They don't care about the specific Pinterest URL someone is coming from because Pinterest is one of the last few domains out there which is actually sharing the full referrer information.

Just general stuff like that, but also which types of custom events are most users tracking and maybe we should make it a built-in event, stuff like that. Yeah. Something I hadn't considered with AI, and we're using AI for support and all these other things, you are kind of disconnecting yourself from the people who are using your product, right? So you're kind of in a vacuum building features, and yet, you know...

You release them to users and they're kind of wondering, what is this for? Who is this for? You might, it's a missed opportunity as a product maker. I think so. Like I talk to AI a lot and I enjoy it. But one thing I really missed for my freelancing days is that I ran into a lot of problems that I could then use to scratch my own itch and maybe turn into a product because...

It's been my dream to build products ever since I started programming. But the ideas are a lot harder to come by now that I'm disconnected from building websites every single day. Yeah, and really the users are the only way to kind of get into that, right? I mean, to see what people are facing and where, you know, you can take things.

That leads me to, you know, what's next for you? Is there anything new coming to Coco or any of your other products we should be looking out for? I'm focusing on Cocoa Analytics right now, and I'm also still involved with MailChimp for WordPress, which is still like... our largest product by far, but Coco has been growing really well. And I hope one day that it can match the success of MailChimp for WordPress. We recently added geolocation, not because...

Again, not because I care for it, but because a lot of our users actually needed it. And we're also adding more advanced tracking of like what type of device or screen. or browser is viewing this specific website because a lot of people are using that to base their design decisions on. So that's one thing that's coming. And we're also working on adding tracking UTM.

parameters by default. So with something like, I'm just curious, like something like browser and device tracking, how do you do that in a way that's privacy friendly? I think the important part is like to not track anything.

anything down to the version number or you have to be quite generic in a way so maybe just the most popular operating systems and if it's a very specific operating system then maybe bucket it into a more generic like a name instead of well if I had a visitor and I see in my analytics that it's using Linux Mint

And it's been viewing five pages that I know for sure it's the same visitor because no one uses that on my site. So I think it's important to bucket things so everything becomes slightly more generic. But you can still use it for, well, it's still a lot more info than not knowing anything about the operating system. Exactly. I mean, I think we're in a time now, too, where all the browsers are automatically updated.

I started in this industry a long time ago when, you know, a couple of versions of Internet Explorer came out a year and you had to manually update and not everyone did. And they're still using an old version and all that. So I think. The version numbers probably aren't as important now, I think, as they were, you know, 15, 20 years ago when we only had a few browsers that you had to really work for.

Yeah, and I think the standardization of browsers has also been improving a lot since Internet Explorer 6. Yeah. Thankfully, yeah. I can't remember the last time I had to look at just a specific browser and say, oh, man, this just doesn't work. Things generally do work across browsers these days, which is thankful for web designers.

site owners too. So anything else coming down the line that we should look for? Well, we're doing our own anti-spam... protection lately and it's funny because we we have been suffering from a lot of bot signups which would just go through our purchase flow and then get stuck on the final step where you're making a payment and we've been getting very good at stopping it funny

example is that they're all using the same user agent for every couple of weeks. So we've been logging that extensively and we're building up quite a nice database. on user bots and the types of methods they use. So I've been thinking of maybe building something and offering it to the... to the general public. So maybe I'm doing something like that so you can protect your site from bot signups or comment form spam without requiring it.

a third party. I think that would be nice, but don't pin me down on it, please. Well, I could tell you there's definitely a need for it. Yeah, privacy focus, not using a third party would also be a huge bonus for a lot of people because we have... Cloud Flares, Turnstile, we have Recaptcha from Google. But both of those are third-party solutions. So having something that you can host on your own site.

and maintain the privacy aspect of it, I think would be awesome. So definitely let us know if you go ahead with that, because we'd love to talk to you about it. I will, thank you. Well, Danny, I want to... I say thank you for being on the WP Minute. And where can folks find you and connect with you online? I'm on BlueSky since a couple of weeks. I've not been as good in checking it daily, but I'm getting there.

People can search for Danny Van Coten on Blue Sky. And if they do, please send me a, what do you call it on Blue Sky? I think it's just a chat. Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you again for being on. And everyone, thank you for joining us here on the WP Minute today. Be sure to check us out at thewpminute.com slash subscribe. There you can receive our newsletter.

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