User Metrics With Amplitude And NextJS
By Xavier Collantes
8/11/2025
Why Are User Analytics Important?
At Google and a couple of the startups I was at, it was extremely important to
understand user metrics because you have to be user focused on every step of
things you build.
To be user focused, you have to ask questions like: what does the user do? What
works with the user? What does not work with the user?
Without user metrics, we are blind. Without it, we leave the fate of our world to chance.
Common Questions To Ask
As part of user focus, these are the common questions to start to ask:
- How many users are using the product?
- How long are users using the product?
- What features are users using? Which do they not use?
- Where are users coming from?
- Which platforms do users use? iOS, Android, Web, MacOS, Windows, etc.
Once the answers are obtained from these questions, it will be clear on next
steps to increase user engagement or product usage.
What is Amplitude?
Amplitude is a platform for collecting, analyzing, and acting on user behavior
data.
I chose Amplitude because of its simplicity over Google Analytics and its free
features over other competitors like Umami and
PostHog.
I found the documentation lacking for NextJS, so I had to dig through the
code to determine how to track events.
Cool Features
Autocapture:
Automatically capture user interactions and page views with a few lines of code.
Unlimited feature flags:
Create and manage feature flags for your application on Free plan.
Data retention for 1 year:
Retain data for 1 year on Free plan. Compared to Umami's 6
months on Free tier.
Heatmaps: Visualize user
interactions and page views with a heatmap. Available
with the Pro plan.
How to Get Started with Amplitude with NextJS
Create an account on Amplitude.
Create a new project.
Add the Amplitude script to your website.
For most frameworks, you can use the Amplitude script to track events. There
is a great guide by
ianduhamel
on how to implement Amplitude in NextJS but I found an easier way with
Amplitude's new
Autocapture
feature.
Here's all you need to do to get started:
In the
_app.tsx file, add the following code:Specify this in the .env.local file.
ts1const AMPLITUDE_API_KEY = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_AMPLITUDE_API_KEY
2
3useEffect(() => {
4 init(AMPLITUDE_API_KEY, undefined, {
5 autocapture: true,
6 })
7}, [])
8Specify this in the .env.local file. hosted withby Xavier
You should now be able to see the events in the Amplitude dashboard.
Further Reading
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