[justWells]

I genuinely don’t understand why you wouldn’t use a product like Heap or Amplitude to do this type of tracking

[bigyikes]

Even if you use Amplitude, this could still be helpful information. I’m not sure what kind of APIs Amplitude provides, but we use it at my job. In my work, the details of Amplitude are abstracted away such that this information is still highly relevant.

At a minimum, this kind of information is relevant to the people creating products like Heap or Amplitude.

[justWells]

You can just pass props to events like any other object data structure.

I work at Heap and am just curious why you would still want to implement manually coded tracking.

[bigyikes]

At my company, the analytics APIs are provided by a platform team.

I think there’s some utility in a company owning an abstraction away from a third party.

Supposing if Amplitude (or Heap) were to ever go under, or if we were to want to change Analytics providers for whatever reason, it would be extremely helpful if the code didn’t depend directly on these third parties.

On a smaller app, I would mostly likely directly use the Heap or Amplitude APIs.

(Late reply, apologies)

[zmxz]

UBlock blocks Amplitude. Nextdns blocks Amplitude.

You get incomplete, inaccurate data.

It's also fun and good for curiosity to do something on your own rathern than rely on a service and never think about what browsers can do.

[Gigachad]

Most users don’t use analytics blockers. You get more than enough useful data from these users.

[makapuf]

100% of people asked answer surveys. They're perfectly reliable.

[Gigachad]

Yes, surveys are generally regarded to be good enough.

[XCSme]

Is this related to the article? How do you track time spend on page for a single page-visit using Heap? Don't they have to use a similar mechanism as described in the article?

[justWells]

That’s a tougher one. But you can just send the app time stamps and do a bit of math between events.