Overview
SimpleAnalytics is a privacy-first analytics platform that respects your visitors. It's fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations, offering 100% accurate data without using cookies or collecting any personal information. It's a great way to understand your newsletter's performance while maintaining your subscribers' privacy.
Integrating SimpleAnalytics with your Buttondown newsletter is straightforward and takes just a few minutes.
Sign up for SimpleAnalytics
This guide assumes that you're already using SimpleAnalytics. If not, you can sign up for SimpleAnalytics and add your website to get started.
Connect SimpleAnalytics to Buttondown
To integrate SimpleAnalytics with your Buttondown newsletter:
- Go to your Buttondown settings. Navigate to the Integrations page in your Buttondown dashboard.
- Enable SimpleAnalytics. Find the SimpleAnalytics section and toggle it on.
That's it! SimpleAnalytics will automatically start tracking your newsletter's web archive traffic.
What gets tracked
Once enabled, SimpleAnalytics will track:
- Page views on your newsletter archives
- Visitor sources and referrers
- Browser and device information
- Geographic data (country-level only)
All tracking is done in a privacy-friendly way without storing any personal information or using cookies.
Viewing your analytics
To view your newsletter's analytics, log into your SimpleAnalytics dashboard. You'll see data for your newsletter domain (either buttondown.com/yourusername or your custom domain if you've set one up).
SimpleAnalytics provides insights into:
- Total page views and unique visitors
- Top pages (your most popular newsletter issues)
- Traffic sources
- Countries your visitors are from
- Devices and browsers used
Privacy considerations
SimpleAnalytics is designed with privacy in mind:
- No cookies are used
- No personal data is collected
- Visitors are not tracked across websites
- All data is anonymized
- You own all your data
This makes it an excellent choice for newsletter writers who want to understand their audience while respecting their privacy.