Hello world from Metricalp

Brief History

Web analytics born with the purpose of measuring the performance of websites. The first web analytics tool was created in 1993 by Matthew Gray. It was a simple counter that counted the number of visitors and page views. In 1995, the first commercial web analytics tool was launched by Webtrends. It was a log file analyzer that provided basic information about the visitors. In 1997, Webtrends launched a new version of its tool that was able to track the visitors behavior. We see that the web analytics history is almost long as the web itself. While the web has evolved a lot since then, web analytics has not changed much. Especially main goal of web analytics has not changed. It is still about measuring the performance of websites. However, the web has changed a lot. The web is not only about websites anymore. It is about web & mobile apps, IoT devices, smart TVs, smart watches, etc. The web is everywhere. Nowadays it is more about understanding visitor than just counting numbers. It is about understanding the visitor behavior and making decisions based on that.

But although this long history, web analytics is still not a mature field. There are still many challenges in applications. In this blog post, we will talk about these challenges and how we solved them in Metricalp. First of all, lets talk about the privacy. Privacy is a big concern for web analytics. Many years ago it was not a huge topic. Data was already anonymous or pseudonymous. But nowadays, it is a big topic. There are many regulations like GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, etc. that are trying to protect the privacy of the users. These regulations are making it harder to collect data. But it is not only about regulations. Users are also more aware of their privacy. They are using ad blockers, cookie blockers, etc. to protect their privacy. So, it is getting harder to collect data. But it is not only about collecting data. It is also about storing data. You need to store the data in a secure way. You need to make sure that the data is not leaked. You need to make sure that the data is not stolen. You need to make sure that the data is not misused. So, privacy is a big concern for web analytics. When we check the most famous web analytics tools like Google Analytics, we see that they are not caring privacy much. They are using cookies to identify people and they are not clearly claiming that they are not sharing the data with third parties.

But of course we were not the first one, realizing that privacy matters web analytics tools are a need. But when we check the tools which provides privacy, we see that they have bottlenecks in other areas. For example performance. Many tools are harming your websites performance. Also, we realized they are lying to you about not sharing or storing your data. We saw many data leaks from these tools. So, we decided to build a web analytics tool that is privacy first. We decided to build a web analytics tool that is fast. We decided to build a web analytics tool that is reliable. We decided to build a web analytics tool that is easy to use. We decided to build a web analytics tool that is affordable. We never share your data or we never identify your visitors. We never use cookies. We never store your private data. We never sell your data. We implemented amazingly fast algorithms and we are using the latest technologies to make sure that we are always blazingly fast. While our algorithmns insanely great, our data aggregation is much better than all other competitiors, our costs are low even for handling billion events. While we can keep costs low, we can provide best prices to our user always. We always have one of (generally the most) cheapest prices in market.

We are using AWS, Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare as tech stack. All our data centers are in Europe🇪🇺 and they are %100 data-protected. We are generating backups regularly. We always repeating same thing, we are also customers of our own product. We are using Metricalp for our own websites and we implemented it for good sense developers like us.

So, at the final we have a web analytics product which achieves

• %100 privacy focused. No cookies and full gdpr compilant.
• Has the cheapest prices in market
• Has the most generous packages in the market
• Has the best performance in the market
• Has the best algorithms and data aggregation implementations in the market
• Only two-way session tracker analytics in the market

Because we believe that, after these many years, the developer community deserves this features in a web analytics tool.

Future Vision

We are proud the product we got at the final. But while we feel that we are really doing valuable things like good product for best prices, why stop here?

The other world, Mobile

While we have all insane algorithms to keep analytics data for web, we can apply this easily to mobile. Just data sources, event types and event props will change but the algorithm will be same. So, it is not a huge thing for us and mobile support is on the destk and coming soon definitely.

Always smooth integration

While we have official plugins for some popular frameworks like React, Next we are planning to implement plugins for all popular frameworks as much as possible. Also when we have mobile dashboards, we will have mobile SDKs too. But, event without a plugin you can use Metricalp for all web platforms from day first. Just embed script tag and that's it.

The vibe, AI

AI is about data and we have data. We are planning to implement AI features to Metricalp. What if AI comment or summarize your data? What if AI help to decide your next marketing strategy based on your data? What if AI forecast the future of your visitor trend? We are planning to implement this kind of features in future. The good part is, we already know that these all 100% possible nowadays.

Conclusion

We are proud to have this great product and we are sure about that dev community will love our product. Because we are part of that community and we implemented this for us. But we are at very start, we know that the hard work is just started. We know that we need to improve our product day by day. We will try to keep this always in heart of developers. The journey has just started and we are so ready for it. We are so excited to share our journey, our product, our vision, our passion with you. We are so excited to share our Metricalp with you. 💜