Gaaust

Gaaust - Audience Analytics Tool for Writers

Gaaust is an abbreviation of “Gather Audiences’ Stats”. Gaaust focuses on audiences of content.

Currently, Gaaust focuses on helping individual writers and small businesses.

Problems We Have

We as writers who post articles on the web have several problems. While writing this post, these problems are on my mind, and I keep thinking about how we can solve them.

First of all, we have to make Google find our articles. If Google doesn’t discover the articles, we should distribute them ourselves.

Second, in the era of AI, AI may or may not search the articles we write. AI makes the articles discover but also reduces traffic because users don’t need to read the full article.

Third, we need to know how many readers we have and what articles they read most. If we don’t know the data, we’ll keep trying without clear direction until we get enough subscribed or followed readers.

Last but not least, we need to know the flow of readers. Where the readers come from, what content they read next, what interactions they do next, and so on.
By understanding this flow, we can change recommended articles, make readers stay longer, sign up, follow, subscribe.

Why I’m Building Gaaust

These problems are on my mind while writing this post. While all of them matter, I knew I can’t solve everything at once.

The first two problems, getting Google to discover your articles and dealing with AI search, are important. But they’re about distribution and external factors beyond my control.

The real gap is in understanding your readers. Most writers don’t know how many people actually read their content, which articles perform best, or how readers move through their site. This is where Gaaust comes in.

I’ve been building a self-hosted blog and faced this problem myself. I looked for existing tools like Google Analytics, but they’re designed for product teams. They provide data about A/B tests, Web Vitals, and user behavior metrics which is useful for products, not for writers who just want to understand their readers.

So I decided to build Gaaust to focus specifically on what writers need: understanding how many readers you have, what they read, and how they move through your content.

What Data Should Gaaust Provide?

I need views for each piece of content, and that’s all I need. I haven’t been a writer until recently, so I know little about what writers actually need.

But Gaaust is a service for all writers, so it should provide valuable data that writers need.

Data We Need

I know that we need data such as:

  1. Content views for each article to find the most performed content
  2. Where readers come from (Google, ChatGPT, X, Reddit, etc.) to know that distribution is good enough
  3. What content readers read next to change recommendations
  4. What readers do next (sign up, subscribe, etc.) to calculate conversion rate

Data We Might Need

There are plenty of data that might need. But until we actually need them, I should leave them as a new feature list:

  1. How long readers spend on content
  2. How far readers scroll
  3. When do readers visit
  4. Other things that we don’t know yet

Audience Privacy

Nowadays, keeping audience privacy is important—not just because of laws, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Limitations

However, there are certain limits to maintaining privacy.

First, there’s no way to track unique visitors longer than a day without cookies. If you use a tool that can track visitors longer than a day, in some regions (the EU, California, etc.), you must show a cookie consent banner to audiences.

Second, Gaaust doesn’t collect IP addresses at all because they’re one of the most direct ways to identify individuals. However, Gaaust can track the countries where your audiences are from.

Third, the data we collect may have some flaws due to these limits. Nonetheless, it will show trends about your audiences.

Advanced Tracking Options

Gaaust doesn’t track unique visitors by default, and this won’t change. However, in the foreseeable future, we’ll provide methods (APIs) to identify unique users through identifiers like email addresses or internal user IDs. This may require programming, and some platforms may not support these methods directly.

Note: If you use these methods, you are responsible for informing audiences that you’re tracking unique users and displaying appropriate cookie consent banners.

Content Events

Gaaust tracks every page where the script runs to monitor audience behavior.

Views

Gaaust counts content views per page whenever audiences visit a page. This means if your audience refreshes a page five times, the content views for that page increase by five.

Content Filters

You may want to know how many times audiences visit content you care about—not content list pages or sign-in pages.

Content filters let you filter your pages by your criteria. You can add, remove, or edit content filters anytime.

For example, you might filter out your homepage and admin pages to focus only on article performance.

Conversions

Currently, Gaaust only tracks pages where the script runs. On some platforms, we can’t track pages where you don’t have control, such as sign-in pages. However, in the foreseeable future, we’ll track reader interactions before they navigate to pages you don’t control and filter them by custom labels.

For example, you might want to know how many audiences go to sign in page.

If You Want to Try Gaaust

You just need to add a few lines of simple script to your website within minutes and that’s it.

Supported Platforms

Gaaust supports platforms below:

  1. WordPress
  2. Ghost
  3. Google Tag Manager
    • Platforms that support GTM can use Gaaust
  4. Wix
  5. Any platform where you can add custom HTML/JavaScript

How to Get Started

  1. Sign in and go to dashboard.
  2. Create an organization and a project.
  3. Copy script and paste it in the platform you use.
  4. Wait until audiences read your articles.

How I Use Gaaust - Testing Gaaust on Gaaust

The best way to test Gaaust is using it on Gaaust itself.

I track every page to understand how people interact with the service:

Pricing

We currently offer two plans.

Hobby

Hobby plan is for individuals who are getting started with writing.

It’s free forever and includes:

Starter

Starter plan is for individuals and small businesses that have started to scale.

To maintain the service, Starter plan charges you $20/month.

It provides more benefits than Hobby:

Ready to understand your readers better? Sign in and start Gaaust for free!

No credit card required. It takes just a few minutes to set up.

Get Started →

Feedback Is Always Welcome

I’m still figuring out what writers really need. If you have ideas or feedback, please reach out at email or Twitter/X or join the Discord community to share ideas, report bugs, or just chat about content analytics. I’d really appreciate it.