549384 - Implement site metrics tracking

Reporter

Description

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15 years ago

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; it; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 Build Identifier: alpha after this kinda semiprivate launch I noticed that no stats are included into the website for a client side point of view. I'm wondering if those data are accessible and if there are none if we can tampon this with google analytics or piwik Reproducible: Always

Matt Thompson

Updated

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15 years ago

Summary: stats missing? → need to implement site metrics tracking

Matt Thompson

Comment 1

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15 years ago

Good point Carlo. Have also sent to Drumbeat web dev list for ideas as well.

Michael Haggerty

Comment 2

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15 years ago

In terms of metrics, I have some input for the group. Metrics break down into some key areas for the site, iterated below: 1) OVERALL TRAFFIC - Right now, Drumbeat runs on a central server using Apache. I would like to get awstats going so we can get detailed metrics on overall usage. Awstats gives us information about things like error codes that we are not going to get on Google Metrics, and provides interesting comparison data when put up next to other services. 2) USER METRICS - I would luike to implement Google Analytics on the site in order to understand where people are coming from and what the most popular content is. Drupal has a module for Google Analytics we can just install and enable. IMHO, Google Analytics is more like a dashboard for Drumbeat, it is going to give us a general overview of what is happening at a glance and good information about geographic distribution. 3) DRUMBEAT METRICS - Drumbeat is all about participation, and (as with most large communities) trending is the most important way to analyze performance. There are a few key metrics related to participation I would like to track. Capturing these metrics in awstats or Google Analytics would be rather complex and somewhat redundant, since it is all captured in the Drupal database. These include: Basic: - new registrations - logins - project creation - contributions to projects - Project 'joins,' or people creating membership in a project. Advanced: - usage by content type, for anything contributed to a project: this would help us understand overall usability for project maintainers and (coupled with feedback) tell us what is useful for sharing information about a project. - event registration, compared to community size: this would help us understand how efforts are translating into offline action. I am more interested in understanding whether this serves as a real benchmark more than anything else. - donations by project, for obvious reasons. - overall donation activity and conversions - how many people make it to a donation page compared to how many actually donate. - searches, popular search terms, tags and the popularity of other classifiers: anything used to classify a project should be quantified in order to reveal general trends. Given the nature of Internet trends, this would probably be the most compelling metric of anything in the site. I would expect to see a long tail develop over time. - cross-promotion opportunities (pollination): right now, the IA for Drumbeat is centered on specific projects. Users go to a project page to do all their work, and it is a terminal point from the perspective that no information about related projects is presented. Opportunities are created when users participate in multiple projects, either in terms of contributing content, joining a project, donating to a project, or becoming involved in an event related to a project. I would like to establish metrics aimed at identifying which projects have affiliated users, and testing some features for increasing multi-project involvement within the user base without forcing users to go through traditional searches. So, we would analyze common relationships between projects, present links to affiliated projects, and construct metrics around these 'pollination' features. 4) VIRAL METRICS - Matt and I talked about the use of some more advanced features within Drupal as part of a Phase II for Drumbeat. I would like to enable the embed module within the site and generate some metrics around where and how widgets are being used. Right now, this has not been enabled in Drumbeat, but I think it could be very important for the growth of the community. 5) OTHER METRICS: There are some ad hoc metrics I run personally as part of every project I get involved in. These would traditionally be classified as media metrics, and are centered on understanding where people are talking about a subject on the Internet. I would like to set up something custom that uses feeds from Google Alerts, Technocrati, Flickr, Meetup and other UGC sites and indexes to track WHERE, HOW OFTEN, WHO, and HOW ELABORATELY people are discussing Drumbeat. There are some things that would need to happen to bring this set of metrics to be truly effective (such as standards for tagging within the community, the creation of identifiers / badges people can include, etc) but this sort of analysis would be important for understanding the impact the community is having. It would be worthwhile to put some thought into how to make this a meaningful part of how metrics are conducted.