How to add analytics to your Next.js application

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Next.js has built-in support for measuring and reporting performance metrics. You can either use the useReportWebVitals hook to manage reporting yourself, or alternatively, Vercel provides a managed service to automatically collect and visualize metrics for you.

Client Instrumentation

For more advanced analytics and monitoring needs, Next.js provides a instrumentation-client.js|ts file that runs before your application's frontend code starts executing. This is ideal for setting up global analytics, error tracking, or performance monitoring tools.

To use it, create an instrumentation-client.js or instrumentation-client.ts file in your application's root directory:

// Initialize analytics before the app starts
console.log('Analytics initialized')

// Set up global error tracking
window.addEventListener('error', (event) => {
  // Send to your error tracking service
  reportError(event.error)
})

Build Your Own

import { useReportWebVitals } from 'next/web-vitals'

function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
  useReportWebVitals((metric) => {
    console.log(metric)
  })

  return <Component {...pageProps} />
}

View the API Reference for more information.

'use client'

import { useReportWebVitals } from 'next/web-vitals'

export function WebVitals() {
  useReportWebVitals((metric) => {
    console.log(metric)
  })
}

import { WebVitals } from './_components/web-vitals'

export default function Layout({ children }) {
  return (
    <html>
      <body>
        <WebVitals />
        {children}
      </body>
    </html>
  )
}

Since the useReportWebVitals hook requires the 'use client' directive, the most performant approach is to create a separate component that the root layout imports. This confines the client boundary exclusively to the WebVitals component.

View the API Reference for more information.

Web Vitals

Web Vitals are a set of useful metrics that aim to capture the user experience of a web page. The following web vitals are all included:

You can handle all the results of these metrics using the name property.

import { useReportWebVitals } from 'next/web-vitals'

function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
  useReportWebVitals((metric) => {
    switch (metric.name) {
      case 'FCP': {
        // handle FCP results
      }
      case 'LCP': {
        // handle LCP results
      }
      // ...
    }
  })

  return <Component {...pageProps} />
}

'use client'

import { useReportWebVitals } from 'next/web-vitals'

export function WebVitals() {
  useReportWebVitals((metric) => {
    switch (metric.name) {
      case 'FCP': {
        // handle FCP results
      }
      case 'LCP': {
        // handle LCP results
      }
      // ...
    }
  })
}

'use client'

import { useReportWebVitals } from 'next/web-vitals'

export function WebVitals() {
  useReportWebVitals((metric) => {
    switch (metric.name) {
      case 'FCP': {
        // handle FCP results
      }
      case 'LCP': {
        // handle LCP results
      }
      // ...
    }
  })
}

Custom Metrics

In addition to the core metrics listed above, there are some additional custom metrics that measure the time it takes for the page to hydrate and render:

Next.js-hydration: Length of time it takes for the page to start and finish hydrating (in ms)
Next.js-route-change-to-render: Length of time it takes for a page to start rendering after a route change (in ms)
Next.js-render: Length of time it takes for a page to finish render after a route change (in ms)

You can handle all the results of these metrics separately:

export function reportWebVitals(metric) {
  switch (metric.name) {
    case 'Next.js-hydration':
      // handle hydration results
      break
    case 'Next.js-route-change-to-render':
      // handle route-change to render results
      break
    case 'Next.js-render':
      // handle render results
      break
    default:
      break
  }
}

These metrics work in all browsers that support the User Timing API.

Sending results to external systems

You can send results to any endpoint to measure and track real user performance on your site. For example:

useReportWebVitals((metric) => {
  const body = JSON.stringify(metric)
  const url = 'https://example.com/analytics'

  // Use `navigator.sendBeacon()` if available, falling back to `fetch()`.
  if (navigator.sendBeacon) {
    navigator.sendBeacon(url, body)
  } else {
    fetch(url, { body, method: 'POST', keepalive: true })
  }
})

Good to know: If you use Google Analytics, using the id value can allow you to construct metric distributions manually (to calculate percentiles, etc.)

useReportWebVitals((metric) => {
  // Use `window.gtag` if you initialized Google Analytics as this example:
  // https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/canary/examples/with-google-analytics
  window.gtag('event', metric.name, {
    value: Math.round(
      metric.name === 'CLS' ? metric.value * 1000 : metric.value
    ), // values must be integers
    event_label: metric.id, // id unique to current page load
    non_interaction: true, // avoids affecting bounce rate.
  })
})

Read more about sending results to Google Analytics.

Source: docs/01-app/02-guides/analytics.mdx