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🦔 PostHog provides open-source web & product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host. Get started - free.
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Roadmap: Site Apps #13187

Open joethreepwood opened 1 year ago

joethreepwood commented 1 year ago

We've built a beta of site apps, which enable you to inject code to your product or website from PostHog via posthog-js.

You need to manually opt in to enable this feature by configuring your posthog-js initialization to include opt_in_site_apps: true. Once you do, PostHog will be able to inject code onto your website through posthog-js. We've put together a tutorial that explains how to make a site app if you're interested.

Site apps can be useful for a number of potential tasks, such as displaying feedback forms or posting service update banners. We're very eager for feedback on this feature and would love to hear from you before we consider rolling it out to new users.

Please note that you use site apps at your own risk and that site apps you create cannot currently be deployed for PostHog Cloud users in the EU or US. If you have an app you've built for PostHog Cloud, let us know and we'll try to add it manually!

This feature is on our roadmap. If you like this idea, please leave a 👍 or ❤️ reaction on this post to vote for it -- your votes and feedback help us prioritize what to work on next!

danielthedifficult commented 1 year ago

PostHog user/acolyte here, chiming in :)

I'm kind of surprised to see you adding this feature (and the associated complexity) to your product for something that seems so unrelated to your core mission as I understand it (helping companies understand user behavior and drive product improvement).

The "pros" I see (that can't be done w/o PostHog):

Make it easy to inject code (such as the aforementioned feedback forms or service update banners) based on cohorts (i.e. happiest users, beta-testers, etc.)?

The "cons" I see:

  1. Most site-builders I know (Squarespace, Wix, Appdrag, Strikingly, etc.) have this feature, and if you're building your site from scratch, why wouldn't you inject the code yourself?

  2. The people I see using the 'copy/paste code injection' tool the most often are marketing teams that want to use third party tools (cookie banner managers, feedback form apps, other analytics tools, etc.) and I'm a bit afraid of giving them this ability vs. relying on the standard routes (going through the development/web teams at their company).

I guess I'm fearful that this feature would be hard to maintain/support in production (given the intended non-technical audience, sorry Joe! No disrespect intended to Marketers! ), taking resources away from supporting and developing more core features. Cheers!

:posthog-love:

mariusandra commented 1 year ago

Hey @danielthedifficult , thanks for the feedback!

Perhaps to clarify, we're not really offering this as a way for PostHog users to inject code, but for PostHog apps to do so, and we currently have no plans to build a "inject any random code on my site" apps, like Google Tag Manager.

The example usecases for this are feedback forms and other small popups or widgets that can be used to gather a few extra pieces of data, which then get captured as PostHog events.

Some users want full control over their single page apps' behaviour and design, and would never even consider enabling a site app like "notification bar" or "pineapple mode". Some people built their app via Squarespace and are heavily in their ecosystem (I haven't used their product, only seen it on YouTube).

However there's a middle ground of sites that can find our "site apps" useful: simple websites that just rely on PostHog for their tracking. They might periodically want to put a large banner on top, or ask their users for quick ad-hoc feedback to compliment an already running PostHog experiment. They really don't want to figure out how to hook this up to their site builder's internal. They want things to just work.

danielthedifficult commented 1 year ago

Ohhhh.... @mariusandra indeed that totally changes my perspective. Thanks for taking the time to explain the intention of the product, and apologies for not understanding it first.

Looking forward to see how this feature shakes out !

I can indeed already see how I would like to use this and cohorts (if possible) to create certain experiences.

Cheers, good luck with the feature!

edmundmunday commented 1 year ago

Hey all. Are site apps able to be targeted at specific cohorts? E.g can I use the feature to achieve functionality similiar to what Pendo provides where you can define forms etc and then target them at specific users?

mariusandra commented 1 year ago

Hey @edmundmunday, that's definitely possible, though not something that has been implemented in any app so far. All the pieces to make this work are there.

JPustkuchen commented 3 weeks ago

Thank you very much for this wonderful and helpful feature. If I'm not totally wrong, this is like Posthog's "Tag Manager on steroids" ;)

So the last missing piece (at least for us and our EU clients) is to combine this with a consent manager and tracking opt-in/out! eTracke for example provides this feature since some months and it's super useful: https://help.etracker.com/en/article/etracker-consent-manager/ But well, we like Posthog!

I guess especially for EU and California clients, such a functionality could be very interesting and might be able to replace Cookie Manager solutions, when for example combined with Data Pipelines, so that you won't need many other tracking codes any more?

All in all I think that would give Site Apps even more meaning and helpful functionality. answering some of the Con's from https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/13187#issuecomment-1346312973.

jamesefhawkins commented 3 weeks ago

@JPustkuchen if you check out posthog.com/roadmap - there's a cookie banner product waitlist there :)

I think we're going cookieless web analytics first (will take us through the end of this year roughly ish, no promises!)then will probably build this next for context (again no promises, but you can follow by upvoting the roadmap item)

JPustkuchen commented 3 weeks ago

@jamesefhawkins Whao, what should I say! WHAO!! Thanks for pointing this out and unbelievable that it's already planned. If I can help with ideas or feedback, feel free to ping me! Perhaps some of the points mentioned in my comments may also be helpful?

I'll take a closer look at the plan soon, thank you so much! WHAO! ;)