MetricsBot: Site Traffic in Chat

To learn how many people visited your site today, you open a browser, sign in to analytics, and hunt for the right report. MetricsBot shortens that to one message in Telegram.

The bot has about 397 thousand users. It shows Google Analytics data right in the chat, and you can add it to a work group.

Two commands instead of ten clicks

There are two main requests. /users shows users, and /sessions shows sessions. Each takes a period: today, yesterday, this week, last week, this month, last month or this year.

Type /users today and you get the day figure at once. In the morning before a standup, that is enough to see how traffic is behaving. 📊

• /users. Number of users for the chosen period.
• /sessions. Number of sessions for the chosen period.
• /start. Bot description and authorization.
• /ru. Description in Russian.

Setup in three steps

The bot works with your own Google Analytics account, so you have to authorize it first. The token is set with /settoken, and the data view you want is chosen with /setview.

1. Send /start and read the description.
2. Authorize the bot and set the token with /settoken.
3. Pick a view with /setview.

After that, /users and /sessions return numbers for your own property.

One bot for the whole team

You can add the bot to a work group. Then every member sees the requested data. The marketer, the owner and the developer look at the same figure, and nobody argues about who found it where.

This helps after an ad launch or a release. One person types the command and the others see the result right away. 👥

What it will not replace

MetricsBot gives a quick slice, not a full report. Traffic sources, funnels and user behavior are for the analytics itself.

For daily checks such as is the site alive and did traffic start, it is enough. Think of the bot as a scoreboard, not a laboratory.

Keeping access safe

The token opens access to your analytics data, so do not post it in shared chats or forward it. Forward the numbers only.

If you add the bot to a group, remember that every member will see the figures. Do not add it to chats with outsiders. 🔒

When it pays off

For a small site owner the bot replaces a daily trip into analytics. An agency can keep a group per client, and a developer can quickly check whether traffic dropped after an update.