Edge computing: solving data analytics challenges for web applications

The Challenge

Data Loss: An Industrywide Challenge

Web analytics play a crucial role in understanding user behavior and measuring digital campaign success. However, many companies face a significant challenge: they're losing up to 50-60% of their event data.

This data loss occurs due to several factors, including:

1. Ad blockers preventing event tracking


2. Cookie acceptance and privacy compliance issues


3. Connectivity limitations, especially for mobile users

This significant gap in data collection severely impacts the ability to gain accurate insights into user interactions and campaign performance. This loss is particularly concerning for e-commerce companies, SaaS providers, and digital publishers as these companies rely heavily on granular event data to track conversions, understand user drop-off points, and identify opportunities to improve the user experience.

Collecting the Right Data, At the Right Time

Edgee, a startup leveraging edge computing technology, has developed an innovative solution to this problem by utilizing Fastly Compute, part of Fastly’s Developer Platform. Alex Casalboni, developer advocate at Edgee, explains the core issue: "We worked with several media and SaaS industry leaders and found that organizations are missing out on up to 60% of the user interactions happening in the browser. These events never get recorded in analytics tools like Google Analytics, Amplitude, or Segment, making it impossible for companies to analyze them properly."

Traditional analytics tools struggle to capture these lost events, leaving businesses with incomplete data and potentially misguided insights. Edgee's approach tackles this challenge head-on by collecting data at the edge.

"We are collecting that data even before the page gets sent to the customer. Edgee talks directly to the analytics providers so that your website doesn’t need heavy client-side SDKs, improving security and performance," Alex states. "This is solving a real business problem."

The Solution

Leveraging edge computing for reliable, privacy-compliant analytics

By leveraging Fastly's compute platform, Edgee can process and transmit this data directly to various analytics APIs, including Google Analytics, Amplitude, and others. This approach ensures that critical information about clicks, page views, sessions, and conversions is captured and analyzed, regardless of client-side limitations.

The technical implementation relies heavily on Fastly Compute and WebAssembly.
As Alex notes, "The core of the product could not exist without an edge compute platform like the platform that Fastly provides. Thanks to Fastly’s global network, we’re handling billions of requests every month with single-digit millisecond latency." This technology allows Edgee to run complex computations at the network edge, ensuring speed, efficiency, and reliability in data collection and processing.

Edgee decided to standardize on server-side WebAssembly to foster a new ecosystem of open source components that can run at the edge. WebAssembly also helps Edgee simplify the execution of untrusted code and support multiple programming languages such as Rust, Go, C, C#, Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

Alex also shared: “That’s why we built the Edgee Component Registry, a new way for developers to share and run WebAssembly components at the edge. And this is just the beginning, we’re working on new component types to cover more use cases such as A/B testing, security, and AI inference.”

Benefits for businesses

For businesses, the benefits are clear:

• Edge-based data collection: Capturing events before they reach the customer's browser, bypassing ad blockers and connectivity issues


• Direct communication with analytics providers: Ensuring data reaches analytics or warehousing platforms in real-time, securely, and efficiently


• Privacy-compliant tracking: Anonymizing IPs and enabling tracking of anonymous customers without requiring cookie consent


• Bot detection: Implementing intelligent filtering to improve data quality

Key Takeaway

A step forward in web analytics

Edgee's solution, powered by Fastly's Developer Platform, represents a significant step forward in addressing the challenges of modern web analytics. By moving data collection and processing to the edge, businesses can gain a more complete picture of their digital performance and make more informed decisions based on accurate, comprehensive data.

By leveraging Fastly's compute capabilities, Edgee has created a powerful solution that addresses critical challenges in web analytics, offering businesses a more complete and privacy-compliant view of their customer interactions.

As web technologies continue to evolve, solutions like Edgee's demonstrate the power of edge computing in solving real-world problems. The collaboration between Edgee and Fastly showcases how innovative approaches can address longstanding challenges in the digital analytics space, providing businesses with the insights they need to thrive in an increasingly data-driven world.