It's more fun if your business has some RUM

Understanding how customers are using your system is key to building good software and evaluating the success of new features and improvements. This type of software is call user analytics or real-time user monitoring (RUM).

User analytics can broadly be broken down into two categories, general analytics and targeted analytics.

General analytics would be events like page views, button clicks etc that are very generic. By tracking all these details you’re able to retroactively look at customer behaviour to analyze how people are using your site. Analytics packages typically provide general analytics “for free” automatically when added to your application.

Targeted analytics add special events that depend on your applications goals or depend on events outside the current customer’s actions. For example, if Customer A signs up based on Customer B’s referral code, a “referred customer” event might be added to Customer B, even though he wasn’t directly involved at the time.

I’ve been using Posthog for analytics lately, but there are many packages available. Let me know if there are things you wish you could know about your customers and I’ll see if we can work out how to get those answers.