In our experience, clients love having their analytics in one place, and accessible in their CMS. It makes sense — they shouldn't really need to switch back and forth between multiple products just to gain some quick insight into how their website is performing. Especially if they are already on their website by editing content in the CMS.
Sure — there's always going to be the need to take some deep-dives into your traffic data, hooking things up to campaigns, e-commerce data, and lots more. But that's not what we're here to discuss.
Analytics widgets with Metrix#
Metrix is a new plugin from us, all about analytics widgets. You can create widgets in a dashboard to gain insight into traffic, how your users are interacting with your website, and more. All within a slick interface that makes data (hopefully) easy to understand even for novice users.
Widgets are of course customisable, so you can tailor information shown specifically to your client and their needs.
Not your average widget#
Now you're probably thinking, Metrix just provides widgets to add to the Craft Dashboard — that's cool. And while you're half-right, we ended up taking a different direction for Metrix.
Instead, it's a dedicated dashboard just for your widgets. Why you may ask? A few reasons.
- We don't want analytics widgets to be per-user. Instead, set up by site owners, and viewable by all
- We wanted full control over the user experience, rather than rely on Craft.
- We didn't want analytics widgets to get lost amongst other widgets.
- Visually, widget settings were difficult to manage in the small real estate of a Craft widget.
Views#
You can create multiple Views, which are essentially a collection of widgets. This might be useful if you have multiple tiers of client access, where only certain data is available to users. This is also tied to user permissions, so you can tailor which views are accessible to what users.
In addition, unlike the Craft dashboard, widgets are not defined per-user. They are set for everyone, specific to a view.
Sources#
We support a bunch of popular platforms like Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom and MixPanel. Metrix uses our Auth module, which opens the door for lots of different providers.
Each widget defines which source to use, and while typically you'll stick to a single source, you can totally mix-and-match!
Presets#
One of the biggest pain points we had with other analytics plugins was the initial setup of widgets when starting a project. That's because widgets in the Craft dashboard are per-user, and enforcing certain widgets for users required another plugin (hey there Default Dashboard). It was tedious work.
While the dedicated Metrix dashboard is per-environment, you can also setup preset widgets in your project config as part of Metrix's settings. This means you can (with the click on a button) populate your favourite widgets in a flash. These presets could easily become part of your Craft starter project.
React#
While this doesn't mean anything to the end user of Metrix — but for all the nerds out there — we picked React for this front-end-heavy plugin. While we've historically gone with Vue for our reactive-JS needs, we decided to try something new using React. Its ecosystem is miles ahead of Vue, with some absolutely solid packages out there like Radix (opens new window) which were a joy to use.
You'll need to be familiar with React if you're wanting to create your own Widgets for Metrix to use! In that instance, you can register your own React component to represent your custom widget's interface.
Wrapping up#
So there you go — hopefully if you're looking to have a tighter integration with your analytics of choice, Metrix will be a good option. We feel it's the unofficial successor to Dukt Analytics (opens new window) with some improvements (just like Video Picker).
Metrix (opens new window) is available today for Craft 4 and Craft 5 for $49.