Web Analytics Team

Web Analytics Team

People

Recently shipped

Path cleaning added to web analytics

The web analytics beta continues to improve with new features such as path cleaning rules, which alias URLs together to make results more digestible.

If you're in the beta you can customize your path cleaning rules within your product analytics settings. Each rule is composed of an alias and a regex pattern, so that any URL which matches the pattern is replaced with the alias.

Our experience is that path cleaning is incredibly useful for reducing complex common URLs in web analytics, but try the beta for yourself and let us know what you think!

Join the beta

Goals

  • Make querying fast enough for large customers
    • Sessions table - ship the sessions and switch web analytics over to using it
    • Slow lane - ensure web analytics queries are compatible with the slow lane
  • Do personless events work where necessary (unknown amount of work)
  • Iterate on customer feedback
    • Saved filters
    • Live online user count
    • Improve refresh behaviour
    • Investigate synergies with session replay
  • Product management work
    • Do interviews with YC companies/later stage people to get feedback
    • Figure out the relation between product analytics and web analytics within the product
    • Make web analytics a first class product on website/docs, change positioning where necessary

Handbook

Who are we building for?

Personas

  • Primary Personas:

    • Technical Founder
      • First technical person at the company, responsible for setting up the initial landing page.
      • At an early stage, wants tools that initially cost little to nothing, but won't need to be replaced as the company grows.
    • Product engineer
      • These are the engineers building the product. Normally full-stack engineers skewing frontend or frontend engineers.
      • Product engineers have more limited time. Need to quickly get high-quality insights to inform what they are building and assess what they've shipped.

  • Not a focus but should be usable by:

    • Other engineers
    • Marketing
    • Everyone in the product team (PMs, designers)
    • Non-technical leadership

What types of companies?

We want to build something that will convince our existing large (20k+) customers to turn PostHog on on their marketing website.

Jobs to be done

Web analytics is an opinionated tool, that will help people:

  • Measure and improve the effectiveness of their acquisition strategy
  • Measure and improve the effectiveness of their conversion funnels
  • Understand who is using their website
  • Understand how their website is being used
  • Create simple-to-medium complexity combinations of these (e.g. how likely are people who came in from this ad to convert, compared to everyone else)

Additionally, it should be:

  • Easy to set up
  • Easy to use
  • It's ok if that means we don't cover every use case, as people who need more can use product analytics

Roadmap

3 year goals

  • Be useful for the best high growth companies right from the start
  • Lead companies into other PostHog products as they start to need them, massively boosting them
  • Run on cheap and fast infrastructure
  • Can scale to the biggest websites in the world
  • Solve the extremely common problem of marketing and product using completely siloed data stacks

Feature ownership

You can find out more about the features we own here