PostHog
PostHog is a behaviour analytics tool that shows how visitors use your site without building a profile of them that follows them around the internet.
Most analytics tools were built to answer an advertiser’s question: where did this visitor come from, and did they convert. PostHog was built to answer a designer’s question: what did this person actually do on the page. It records the clicks, the scrolling, the places someone hesitated before leaving, in a way that helps you understand a page’s behaviour without needing a cross-site profile of the person looking at it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. The advertising trackers behind most retargeting and audience-building tools work by following an individual across many sites, building a profile of what they browse and buy so an ad can chase them later. PostHog does not need to do that to answer “why do people leave this page before booking.” It can watch behaviour on your site alone and still tell you something useful, which is the whole idea behind describing it as privacy-friendly.
Why it matters to you
If your booking form has a step where half your visitors give up, Google Analytics will tell you that a form exists and that some people did not complete it. It generally will not show you where in the form they stopped or what they clicked instead. PostHog fills that gap. It is the difference between knowing a leak exists and knowing exactly where the boat is taking on water.
There is also a trust argument that matters for certain kinds of businesses. A counselling practice, a medical office, or anyone whose visitors are looking for privacy has good reason to avoid stacking every advertising tracker available onto their site. Running a lighter, more contained analytics tool alongside the standard measurement is a real signal, not just a technical preference.
How I set it up
I install PostHog under the client’s own account, same as every other tracking tool, so the history and the settings belong to them regardless of what happens with our working relationship. It runs alongside Google Analytics rather than replacing it, since the two answer different questions, and I configure it to collect only what is useful for understanding the site’s own behaviour rather than defaulting to every option it offers.
Where a site also has a Google Tag Manager container, I keep PostHog out of it when possible, since the goal is a lighter footprint, not one more script bundled into the same container as everything else.
What it looks like in practice
Day to day, you will not notice PostHog running. It sits quietly in the background the same way any analytics tool does. Where it earns its keep is in the conversations that follow a slow month: instead of guessing why bookings dipped, I can pull up exactly where visitors hesitated on the page, which is a much shorter path to a fix than staring at a single conversion number and wondering what happened behind it, and it feeds the same plain-language monthly report conversation the rest of your analytics does.
Questions I get about this
- Why would I need PostHog if I already have Google Analytics?
- Google Analytics is built to answer where visitors came from and whether they converted, which is what your accountant and most ad platforms want to see. PostHog is built to answer what people actually did on a page, where they clicked, where they got stuck, without stitching together a cross-site profile to do it. They complement each other more than they compete.
- Does PostHog need a cookie banner like advertising trackers do?
- It depends on how it is configured, and I set it up to collect as little identifying information as the job allows. It is a real step down in tracking intensity from the advertising trackers that follow someone from your site to five others, which is exactly the comparison the tool is built around.
- Who owns the PostHog account?
- You do. It is set up under your own login from day one, same as the analytics and ad accounts, so the history is yours whether or not we keep working together.
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.