Sometimes you want more analytical detail than Google Analytics or Heap or other analytics offerings allow. If you have an internal datastore that you want to match visits up with, you can either pull the tracking data from the web analytics tool, push your data up to the tool, or find some other way to get the web analytics data into your internal datastore.
If you choose the third option, ahoy is the rails gem for you. It’s a simple install and will track visits and visitors (both signed in and anonymous), user agents, time of visit, and more. You can then use it to correlate with internal goals. For instance, if you have a funnel: ‘adwords -> visit -> signup -> create profile -> join group -> participate in group’, you may want to track each step of the funnel. You may want to know how many groups each adwords click joining user joins. There may be aspects of your application that are not accessible via the web that you want to correlate with external indicators (‘how often does billing fail with people who use safari’ is a (fartfetched) example). Answering these questions may be easier to do with SQL than it would be with leveraging an external tool.
However, cohort analysis and other sophisticated statistical analysis may be harder with this data, and if you are looking at doing that you may want to make the investment in pushing data up to one of the other tools, or tagging your application such that all relevant goals are measured by the web tool.
Regardless, ahoy is simple to set up and if you’re looking to pull in web tracking data into your datastore for additional insights, I highly recommend it.
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