Plausible

Plausible is a simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It's fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and offers no cookie use whatsoever. It's a great way to learn more about your site and your subscribers & visitors while respecting their privacy.

Integrating with your Plausible Analytics account is simple and fast. You can integrate with your newsletter and track viewers of your archives, plus see what visitors are clicking on the most and which of your archive pages are most effective at getting folks to subscribe.

This guide assumes that you're already an active user of Plausible, and have set up a site previously. If not, read Plausible's documentation to get started.

To get your Buttondown information into Plausible, you need to do two things:

1. Create a site matching your Buttondown newsletter. This should match your permanent archive URL. If you use a custom domain, use that instead of buttondown.com/yourusername.

1. Enable Plausible syncing in your Integrations page.

The "new subscriber" event is similar to the subscriber.created event type: it fires on all new subscribers, even if they haven't confirmed their subscription.

To track subscribers signing up for your newsletter, add a new custom event to your Plausible site with the exact text of Subscribe. Buttondown will automatically record new goals, including which page your subscriber is on, whenever you get a new subscriber.

To track people clicking through links on your archive, add a new custom event to your Plausible site with the exact text of Outbound Link: Click. Buttondown will automatically record new goals, including which page your subscriber is on, whenever you get a new subscriber.

Go to your website's dashboard on Plausible and you will start to see data trickle in. You can test it by clicking through links and creating a test subscriber. When you do, if you have configured the integration correctly, you will see those events appear in the Goal conversions section of your dashboard.