Basic product analytics in a budibase app

[raziele]

One of my apps is basically a fancy form built with several steps.

I wanted to be able to:

• Identify how many users using the app, and how much
• Understand which steps were taking and how much time it takes them
• Identify where users drop that might indicate issues with the app (e.g a field that is not well understood, too complicated fields etc.)

For this purpose, I used PostHog which is a great product analytics platform.

Here's how I did it:

1. I signed up to PostHog.
2. Based on PostHog API documentation I created a new REST API data source in BB with a POST query that sends a single analytic event. Here's how it looks like:

3. I then used this query whenever I wanted to track a user event. For example, here's a screenshot of how I configured a form text field to send an event when a user inputs something to the field:

one can basically send an event wherever it is possible to execute a query.

A tricky part in this design was how to identifying users.
Since the app has public access I'm not able to fetch the user details from BB, and there is no capability to generate a unique ID for every user who visits the app.
To overcome this, I used UUID Generator. It's a great little product that allows you to generate a unique ID whenever you call their API. I used a REST API source again to create a UUID-generating query:

To use it within the app, I needed a way to execute the query every time a user enters the app and save the result so I can pass it to all the PostHog event queries. I did it by placing a data provider directly under the form (according to the guidelines of a data provider, this query will be executed only once when the app is opened).

BTW, another interesting usage I found for UUID is to allow my users to identify themselves if they want to.
I do it by logging the UUID with the results of the form upon submission AND presenting the UUID to the user as a submission ID - telling them they can use it for future inquires.

Drawbacks:

• I'm not able to distinguish between several users and a user who submitted multiple times
• I'm not able to get any info on the users who visit the app (except the unique ID that was generated for them)

On both points I decided this is good enough so I didn't make any additional efforts in this direction.

[melohagan]

This is fantastic - thanks for sharing!

I'm curious what the use-case for your app was?

For example in the past I've worked on a project that had analytics between form steps to compare how long it took users in a call centre to enter information in the new system compared the old one.

[raziele]

Thank you 😊

The exact use-case is disclosed, but I'll try to share some more context.

The app is a complex form that feeds multiple tables. I use Airtable as a database for now.
I decided on building it with Budibase after researching several form building apps which were not flexible enough.

In my case, we rolled out with a first version of the form with a test group and got very few submissions.

I suspected there could be several reasons for this:

• too many fields. The form had many fields with different type.
• one or more fields that are too complicated for the target user persona. Some were in a format of a drop-down with ability to add new items. Really complex TMO from the start.
• not enough positive validation they are on the right track to a successful submission. I implemented some validation but a user had to wait for some time for the response of an api call.

But, I couldn't prove any of these assumptions. The only "analytics" I had was the number of submissions which was not enough.

So I tried simplifying the form, but I realized that I must have some sort of sense on what my users are doing and where they are getting stuck.

I hope this makes sense.

[melohagan]

Okay that makes sense, thanks for the response :)
I hadn't seen anyone else add analytics to a Budibase app, so it is really cool and unique functionality!

[joebudi]

This is brilliant @raziele

[BKDragon]

With the help of @ConorWebb96 in another of my questions, it is now possible to make semi-permanent tracking for each user. This will make it possible to distinguish between PageViews and UserViews in PostHog.
See details: #11006