Add traffic analytics to your quarto blog

I have recently added lightweight traffic analytics to this blog. I decided not to go for Google Analytics, but use one of the free, open-source, privacy-conscious options instead. I went with GoatCounter. To set up traffic analytics with GoatCounter is quite easy:

• register an account with them
• add a JS snippet to the website you wish to track
• voila!

To integrate the GoatCounter tracking script in the Quarto blog, I used the solution which I found on Danielle Navarro’s blog:

• create an html that will host the script, in my case it was a snippet that GoatCounter sent to me upon creating the account:

<script data-goatcounter="https://HERE_YOUR_GOATCOUNTER_ACCOUNT_NAME.goatcounter.com/count"
        async src="//gc.zgo.at/count.js"></script>

• put this html (in my case, traffic.html) in the main directory of my blog, in the same folder where _quarto.yml lives

• edit _quarto.yml to include the following:

format:
  html:
    include-after-body: traffic.html

That’s it! Now the GoatCounter script will be embedded in all the pages on the blog.

If you are using another tracking provider, Quarto has a tutorial how to switch on cookies and embed your own script.