A while back I posted about why I don't have page view tracking on my blog.

Well, I decided to add analytics to my blog and figured I should explain why.

I thought of two situations where I should probably care about how many people are reading my posts:

1. I recently wrote a post about approval voting. I'm volunteering in an organization that's pushing for the use of approval voting for elections in Massachusetts. They liked the post and asked me how many people have read it. I obviously don't know, because I don't have analytics on my blog.
2. I post infrequent updates about the dating app that I'm building. So far, I've mostly been sharing them because I thought people might find the updates interesting or helpful, but at some point I'll probably start using my blog as a platform for promoting my dating app. I'd like to know whether or not blogging is an effective marketing tool for my app and if it's worth my time.

The common thread between these two example is that I'm starting to use my blog to try to motivate people to do something (support approval voting or download my dating app). With analytics, I'll be able to determine how successfully I'm accomplishing those goals with my posts. If my posts are getting a lot of engagement, that will motivate me to post more frequently.

Important note: I'm still strongly opposed to cookie banners so I will not be adding tracking cookies or any other client-side tracking to my website. Instead, I will be using Netlify's server-side analytics solution, which currently costs $9/month.