N8n and Matomo

Like I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been building an app for my wife’s business. The app is a progress tracking app for writers built with Next.js and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. While I was building this thing, I got to wondering how to create more visibility into server logs and implement automation solutions. After some research, I decided on Matomo for analytics and n8n for automations. Both of these tools have open-source and, more importantly, self-hosted versions. This way, I can manage costs and exercise my self-hosting knowledge.

N8n

I first set up n8n on render.com. It was rather quick and easy using this blueprint created by Eduardo Borges. (Thanks, Eduardo!). Render.com makes it very easy to copy infrastructure built by others through their “Infrastructure as Code” (Blueprints) feature. It was as simple as linking the GitHub repo and hitting submit. The documentation to do this is very straightforward and user-friendly.

I love how feature-rich n8n is, and the automation interface is actually fairly intuitive. I’ve already set it up to send emails every week by integrating a Google Spreadsheet and Gmail SMTP. The visual workflow builder makes it easy to create complex automation without writing code so that my wife and her assistants can create whatever automations they might need (so not to bug the engineers!).

Additionally, n8n supports a wide range of integrations, which means I can connect different services my wife’s business uses without much hassle. I’m interested in exploring its capabilities further, such as automating social media posts or setting up more advanced data pipelines.

For example, I'm currently figuring out an automation that posts weekly updates on social media platforms, using data from the app to highlight the progress and milestones of the writers. This could save a lot of time compared to doing it manually and ensure that the updates are consistent and timely.

Matomo

I discovered Matomo after a few hours of research looking for a self-hosted analytics solution. It seems to have enough of what I need to gain useful visibility into user actions and error logging. The self-hosting process was again very straightforward thanks to this GitHub repo, which automatically deploys an instance to your Render account.

So far, I’m logging a single page of my wife’s business and learning how Matomo works. The dashboard it comes with is fairly noisy in my opinion, but I can get used to it. Despite the initial clutter, Matomo offers a lot of customization options, so I can tailor the dashboards to show the most relevant data. This flexibility is one of the reasons I chose Matomo over other analytics tools. Plus, it’s reassuring to know that all the data stays within our control, enhancing privacy and compliance with data protection regulations.

Matomo’s comprehensive analytics include real-time updates, detailed visitor logs, and customizable reports. As I become more familiar with the tool, I plan to delve into setting up goal tracking and heatmaps to better understand user behavior on the app. By setting up goal tracking, I can see how users progress through the app, which features are most popular, and where they might be encountering issues.

One of the tasks I am planning is to implement heatmaps. This will provide visual insights into how users interact with different elements on the page, highlighting areas that might need improvement or simplification. Understanding these patterns could be useful for optimizing the user experience.

Conclusion

So far, I am quite happy with these tools, and I’ll continue to improve upon them. I’m planning on writing out my thoughts a bit more extensively once I have more familiarity. I am trying to plan out and understand the architecture of this app before it gets too large and the ability to add these necessary integrations becomes non-trivial.

Integrating n8n and Matomo into my app has been a fun learning experience. They have not only provided immediate benefits but also opened up new possibilities for automation and analytics, which are necessary in making data-driven business decisions. The ability to automate repetitive tasks and gain deep insights into user behavior will be very useful.

I look forward to sharing more updates on how these integrations evolve and contribute to the success of my wife’s business. If you’re considering using n8n or Matomo, I highly recommend diving in – and the learning curve is very manageable.gg