This year we organized the second iteration of React Miami Conference on April 20th and 21st in Miami, FL. While organizing the conference, Vercel released a Beta version of their new Analytics dashboard to their Pro customers which gave us insights that dramatically changed the planned trajectory and marketing of our event. Below is a quick summary of what I found helpful and how we leveraged this information to build a better website and conference.
Dead Simple Set Up
In true Vercel fashion, getting Analytics set up was remarkably easy. It only took a few minutes to step through very clearly described instructions to get started. This speed is important because we want to work on coding the things that drive the purpose of our website -- selling tickets and getting sponsorships.
Configurations, setups, integrations, etc. can become simply unfeasible when faced with the endless tasks of conference organizing. We do not have time to spare battling with embedded code snippets that don't work when there are business-critical items to handle with attendees, speakers, sponsors, vendors, marketing, and so on.
Analytics unlocks a treasure trove of application data faster than it would take to write the JIRA ticket to set it up.Instant Insight
What you see in the dashboard is quite helpful! We want to reach developers around the world, however, outside of social media mentions and ticket sale data, it can be difficult to determine where our message is landing. Also, after setting up other analytics tools became too time-consuming they got axed.
Finally, after quickly setting up Analytics we can see that our conference has proliferated the developer community worldwide in a way I could have never understood before! I can also see the devices our visitors are on and what browsers they’re using. Knowing whether the majority of traffic is coming from mobile or desktop is helpful because while the site is fully responsive, at times there are layouts that are tricky on mobile. Being able to see that most visitors aren't even interested in those routes helps us make more time-saving decisions.
Most importantly, I can see the top pages visited and the top referrers to our website. Before Analytics, I was certain I was driving the most amount of traffic to our site via Twitter. While that is pretty high on the list, sometimes it’s not even in the top 3! This was enlightening because I discovered React Miami is being promoted on conference websites and developer newsletters I didn’t even know existed which gives us direction on where we may want to focus our attention for future collaborations and partnerships for our event.Down to Numbers
Seeing the exact quantities of each section of the Analytics dashboard is beneficial for both pure understanding and accurately deriving further analysis. (If there's one thing I want more of, it’s this!) The most helpful section for us has been Top Pages.
For back story: The React Miami site is a fork of Vercel’s Virtual Event Starter Kit that I reworked into a new template for in-person events. In the vein of Vercel branding (and a site template), the site is very simple which I love. However, when you’re giving away tickets for a virtual event simplicity is less consequential for registrations because it’s a low-risk decision. In-person conferences rely on communicating much more since attendees are facing the fees of tickets, travel, lodging, and daily expenses. I’ve grappled with moving away from the simplicity of the template because I was unsure if it was hurting our conference.
Alas, Analytics. I could now see exactly how many visitors were coming to our website and what routes they were visiting. I could see that only 1/2 of visitors clicked on another route and that the Speakers and Tickets pages were typically tied for second place. The About page, where I have most of the “storytelling” is visited by around 1/4 of visitors.At the time I saw this, we had no speakers on our website and didn’t intend to share any until the Call for Papers was closed two months later. I quickly realized this was hurting us since visitors that explored our site weren't finding what they wanted.
Using this information I gathered a small group of speakers to announce a Speaker Preview before our Call for Papers closed and sure enough, tickets started moving. We had developers purchase tickets from 13 countries while still in the early stage of promoting (final count 21!). I 1000000000% believe we wouldn’t have seen those sales without Analytics showing me visitor behavior.Additionally, I used this visitor data to implement a button linking the About page to above the fold on the landing page and converted the promo video on the About page into a hero element. I also took summaries of the second most visited pages (Tickets and Speakers) and moved them to the landing page so that the 50% of visitors that only stopped there would get a more complete impression of our event.
On the Analytics page, not only can I see the routes visitors hit, but the routes visitors try to guess by manually typing them in. I could see enough visitors trying to find a schedule that we decided to release it immediately after the full speaker lineup was announced -- two months ahead of what we planned.No Google Analytics
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In summary, Vercel Analytics is actually very sick because it saves me an enormous amount of time implementing, provides key insights into who our visitors are, illustrates a pattern of behavior among our visitors, and makes Google Analytics avoidable.