Starting to measure traffic
After What I Learned While Opening Digging Music, I added Google Analytics to the service so I could start tracking visitors and pageviews.
The setup itself was simpler than I expected. I only needed to add the tracking code to the HTML head of every page. Once the code was included, Google Analytics began collecting traffic data across the site.
The numbers were small, but they made the service feel more real.
On days with more traffic, the site reached around 1.5k views. On quieter days, it had around 500 views. These were not huge numbers, but they were enough to show that people were actually entering the site and looking around.
One thing I regret is that I added analytics a little late. When I first started What I Learned While Opening Digging Music, there were probably more visits than the data now shows. Since tracking was not active yet, I missed that initial spike.
Still, adding analytics changed the way I looked at the service. Before that, user reaction was mostly something I guessed from messages, feedback, or visible activity. After adding analytics, I could at least begin to observe the service through numbers.
This was a small technical task, but an important operational step. A product is not only something to build. It is also something to measure, observe, and improve based on what actually happens.