Looking back at 2022 and ahead to 2023

As 2022 draws to a close, we’d like to look back at the year and share what we’re planning for 2023.

First, we know we haven’t communicated enough with our customers. We do our best to keep you up to date on work in progress and upcoming features, but in 2023 we want to share more regular, detailed updates.

Looking back at 2022

It’s been a busy year at Trackboxx. We’ve introduced plenty of new features and improvements, focusing especially on things users have repeatedly asked for. We’ll keep doing that next year: our aim is to make Trackboxx genuinely useful and easy to work with.

Performance and scalability have kept us busy for most of the year. As our customer base grew quickly, we introduced new systems to keep the dashboard fast and filters responsive.

In the third quarter, we also decided to make major changes to Trackboxx’s infrastructure. We’ll explain those in the section on our plans for 2023.

Our customer base has grown strongly, even without active advertising. Trackboxx now has more than 600 active customers and over 1,000 websites, including sites with more than a million visitors a month.

Holding off on advertising was a deliberate choice. We wanted to let the system grow gradually so we could respond to new demands. Performance was our main concern: how would our servers and databases cope with more tracked visits and larger volumes of stored data?

With that in mind, we made several changes this year:

1. Revised our pricing and subscription plans
2. Introduced a free plan
3. Moved support for unlimited websites from a standard feature of every plan to a paid add-on
4. Made the Google Search Console integration a paid add-on instead of including it free as standard

Overall, we’re delighted with how 2022 has gone. It’s given us a solid foundation for 2023. Here’s what comes next.

Looking ahead to 2023

What are we working on?

For the past few months, much of our work has focused on rebuilding Trackboxx’s infrastructure. This includes moving to our own server infrastructure—an investment that will give us more room to grow and scale.

Our servers will remain in Germany, specifically at the data centre in Frankfurt am Main.

We’re also redesigning the server architecture to handle very high traffic efficiently and scale as our user base grows.

Another major change is our database technology. We currently use MySQL with Columnstore and are moving to ClickHouse, which delivered up to 90% better performance in our tests.

We’re already migrating Trackboxx to the new infrastructure in stages and expect to finish by the end of January.

After that, we’ll move straight on to new features, including:

E-commerce tracking

We hope this will give Trackboxx a real edge over its direct competitors. E-commerce tracking will be a paid add-on that unlocks a new section in your dashboard.

This section is designed for online shops. It will show data on products sold, bestsellers, shopping basket views and more. Here’s an early screenshot, without live data yet.

Better PDF reports

Our current PDF reports are very basic. We’re building a completely new system for detailed, customisable PDF reports, with automated reporting included.

Email notifications and updates

We’re improving the automated messages Trackboxx sends you. For example, we want to notify you when you’ve used 80% or 100% of your pageview allowance, so you can take action. You’ll also be able to configure other important system notifications to be sent automatically.

User journeys

This is a feature we’re particularly excited about. It will analyse the data Trackboxx collects and present it visually in a completely new view. The idea is to save you work by showing which channels, such as Facebook, perform well and how individual visitors use your website. For example:

A visitor arrives from Facebook, views certain pages and then completes a conversion. You’ll be able to analyse this for individual visitors or entire channels, such as Facebook, Google Ads or a referring website. Here’s a screenshot of the feature, which will also be available as a paid add-on.

An additional tracking mode without collecting IP addresses

Trackboxx already uses a privacy-friendly tracking method: it captures a visitor’s IP address once, encrypts it and automatically deletes it after 24 hours. We want to go a step further with an optional mode that skips even this one-time collection. You’ll be able to enable this more privacy-focused option in the dashboard.

The trade-off is that some metrics will be less precise and certain dashboard sections won’t be available in this mode.

We’re working on plenty of other improvements too. Check our Roadmap for more details.

The Trackboxx team

We also plan to expand the team so we can move faster next year. We want to hire another developer and finally start actively promoting Trackboxx. There are still a few bugs to iron out, but after the progress we’ve made over the past 12 months, we feel ready to bring Trackboxx to a wider audience.