Faro Stats

Every project hosted under portale3d.it — from games to tools to demos — generates traffic and interactions, and at first each one had its own separate dashboard. Chasing numbers scattered across ten subdomains is the surest way to never look at them. That's why Faro exists: a single in-house analytics system that gathers everything in one place, built for the whole portal ecosystem rather than one site at a time. The name isn't random — a faro is a lighthouse, the point from which you keep an eye on everything else.

Why not any analytics

The technical choice that defines Faro is server-side tracking. Most common analytics tools load a third-party script in the browser that calls a well-known external domain — and that domain is exactly the first thing every adblocker blocks. The result is that a significant slice of visits never gets counted. Faro does the opposite: a small script (track.php) is included on every page and records the event from the server, not with a call from the user's browser to a third party. There's no request to an ad domain to block, so it isn't blocked: the numbers are closer to reality.

There's a second advantage too, less technical and more a matter of principle: the data doesn't pass through an external service. It stays on the portal's server, under my control, without shipping visitors' behavior off to a third-party platform.

What it measures

• Visits and traffic sources for every connected project
• Clicks on projects and social links from the homepage, tracked as a dedicated event (project_click): not just how many people arrive, but what they actually click on
• Trends over time, to see which content works and which doesn't
• Earnings per project, to tie traffic to the result

It's not a theoretical demo: as I write, Faro has already collected over 12,000 events across nine different types, from June 15 to today, all from the portal's real projects. It's the system this very site uses to measure itself — including, soon, how the ad slots perform once they're live.

How it works

A small JavaScript SDK (faro/sdk.js) is included on every page of the portal and sends events to a collection endpoint (collect.php); a PHP dashboard aggregates them and presents them in readable form. On top of the raw numbers there's an AI-assisted summary layer: instead of leaving you to interpret a table of metrics on your own, a model highlights the most meaningful trends — what rose, what fell, where it's worth looking — turning the data into a reading, not just a chart.

Why build it in-house

An analytics tool built on your own will never compete with the industry giants on breadth of features. But for an ecosystem of projects like this one it has three advantages that matter more: it counts the visits the others lose, it keeps the data at home, and it's simple enough to adapt — a new event, a different metric — the moment you need it, without depending on someone else's release schedule.