Plausible
Plausible is a simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It's fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and offers no cookie use whatsoever. It's a great way to learn more about your site and your subscribers & visitors while respecting their privacy.
Integrating with your Plausible Analytics account is simple and takes all of five minutes! You can integrate with your newsletter and track viewers of your archives, plus see what visitors are clicking on the most and which of your archive pages are most effective at getting folks to subscribe.
Signing up for Plausible
This guide assumes that you're already an active user of Plausible, and have set up a site previously. If not, consult Plausible's documentation to get started.
Connecting your Plausible account to Buttondown
To get your Buttondown information into Plausible (and vice-versa), you need to do two things:
Create a site matching your Buttondown newsletter. Note that this should match your permanent archive URL; if you have purchased a custom domain, use that instead of buttondown.email/yourusername.
A screenshot of what your Plausible settings page should look like. Enable Plausible syncing in your Integrations page.
A screenshot of the magical toggle in the Integrations section of the settings page.
Tracking new subscribers
The "new subscriber" event is similar to the subscriber.created event type: it will fire on all new subscribers, even if they haven't confirmed their subscription.
In order to track new subscribers signing up for your newsletter, add a new custom event to your Plausible site with the exact text of Subscribe. That's all you need to do: Buttondown will automatically record new goals (including which page your subscriber is on!) whenever you get a new subscriber.
Tracking outbound link clicks
In order to track folks clicking through links on your archive, add a new custom event to your Plausible site with the exact text of Outbound Link: Click. That's all you need to do: Buttondown will automatically record new goals (including which page your subscriber is on!) whenever you get a new subscriber.
Verify that your newsletter is all wired up correctly
Lastly, go to your website's dashboard on Plausible and you should start to see data trickle in! Feel free to play around with it by clicking through links and creating a test subscriber: you should see those events show up in the Goal conversions section of your dashboard.
