Analytics

Background

FastComments provides several types of analytics to site admins, and any user with the Analytics role.

In this documentation we'll cover both Analytics and Billing Analytics, what they are, the accuracy, and common use cases.

Billing Analytics

Any metrics that you may be rate limited or billed for are reported on in the Billing Analytics Page.

Some example metrics that are tracked:

Page Loads (for the current month)
API Credits (for the current month)
New Comments Stored (for the current month)
Tenant Users
SSO Users
Moderators
Domains

For the Creators and Pro plans, these metrics simply serve as a guide to know if you are close to or have hit the limits of your account.

For the Flex plan, this page will show a cost breakdown of current usage for the next invoice. This makes it easy to understand how you will be billed before it happens. You can see past invoices in Billing History.

The metrics Page Loads, API Credits, and New Comments Stored may be up to one minute out of date. The other metrics are realtime.

This information is stored on a monthly basis for one year, or until you delete your tenant, for historical purposes, but the UI will only show the current period.

Site Analytics

Site Analytics, or just called Analytics in the dashboard, provides an overview of how your community is using FastComments across all your domains.

FastComments provides some unique features that many other platforms do not offer, like live reporting on users online on each page, and sorting pages by the number of online users. To do this, simply visit the Analytics Page and click Sort by users online under Top Pages.

Both the total Users Online and Top Pages metrics are live and are reported with no delay.

Top Pages by default will sort by the number of comments on each page.

Finally, a breakdown is provided for total metrics across your tenant, by day, over time for:

Page Loads
- This is the number of times a user opened a page that contains one or more FastComments widgets. If the page contains multiple widgets, then this number will be incremented by the number of widgets on that page. If you have an SPA, then every time the application opens a new comment thread, this number would be incremented. This applies to the React Native library as well.
- This metric is also used for billing purposes in the Flex plans.
Comments Left
- This includes all comments, regardless of verification or approval state, or if they are spam or not.
Votes Left
- This is for the number of votes left. It will only count verified votes, unless anonymous voting is enabled.
Accounts Created
- This metric is for when a new SSO user is added, or a commenter comments with FastComments for the first time using your site.

These metrics are near-realtime, being delayed up to one minute.

Analytics Accuracy vs Other Platforms

You may find that our Analytics metrics show slightly different numbers than, say, Google Ads © or similar products.

For sites with one comment widget per-page, the numbers provided by FastComments Analytics are very accurate, and if incorrect will be lower than the actual value, but not more.

If you have an SPA you may find the FastComments Analytics numbers are higher than those reported by your marketing products. This is because the marketing product may only be tracking when the page is not loaded, but not every time a user does something in the page that might trigger a new comment thread from showing, which would count as a page load to FastComments Analytics.

Technical Information

FastComments Analytics tracks every page load, and does not rely on randomness as an optimization. Every page load results on an in-memory count being updated in each thread on each server, which is then periodically persisted to the database via an atomic operation.

Google Analytics

We can configure FastComments to notify Google Analytics 4 when someone interacts with the comment widget.

We can track when users:

Comment.
Vote.

Here's an example code snippet to do that:

Google Analytics 4

Copy

<script src="https://cdn.fastcomments.com/js/embed-v2.min.js"></script>
<div id="fastcomments-widget"></div>
<script>
    FastCommentsUI(document.getElementById('fastcomments-widget'), {
        tenantId: "demo",
        onReplySuccess: function (comment) {
            gtag('event', 'post_comment', {
                'event_category': 'Engagement',
                'event_label': 'Comment Posted'
            });
        },
        onVoteSuccess: function (comment) {
            gtag('event', 'vote_comment', {
                'event_category': 'Engagement',
                'event_label': 'User Voted on a Comment'
            });
        }
    });
</script>

This will add two events:

Label: Comment Posted, Category: Engagement, ID: post_comment
Label: User Voted on a Comment, Category: Engagement, ID: vote_comment

That's everything to deal with Analytics for now. Let us know below if you think we've missed something, thank you!