I was wondering if there is someone who is actually looking at the Google Analytics data, to get insights about user experience and user interests in haiku-os.org?
Does the site use GTM? Optimize? Has GA been customized to fit the Haiku community needs?
and, at first place, which are the main “reasons” the website actually exists at first place? awareness? conversions? download? interactions? recruitment?
I’m searching a way to contrib to the project since weeks; if this could be on any help…well…do web analytics is my job actually
Since migrating from Drupal to a static site hosted on a global CDN (so, 1.5 years now), we don’t even have Google Analytics at all. We might want to look into setting up a self-hosted solution … but really, Google Analytics is overkill, and most ad-blockers block it by default anyway.
Really. It’s not. And this is my job, so I’m quite sure about what I say Every bit of informations in a modern web analytics tool is priceless to understand the real behaviours of users in a website. This to improve the website, ofc. No self-hosted, custom-made, hacker-friendly or piwik-esque tools can do the same. They are merely enanched logs (well, maybe piwik is not so bad, after all; but still light years behind).
Btw it was just an idea to help haiku, I don’t want to trig a flame on something. If you don’t think it would be useful to perform this, well, nevermind. Your site, your choices
(just to be clear, I’m not necessarly a Google fan or addicted but neither I hate it just because they make money from the internet. I simply use their products if they are useful for my job/life)
Well, maybe for large corporations, but not for us. We are not a company selling a product, we are volunteers with a hobby (for now…). We don’t need to worry about how much money per click we’re making.
Maybe not, but we have always valued privacy around here, and in recent years we’ve started to value it even more, and Google has begun valuing it less and less, it seems.
I don’t know, actually. Web analytics is not my job and I’m curious what we could learn. We could deploy analytics for some time and gather data, just to see what we can discover.
On privacy, I would agree for the OS itself, but collecting anonymous data on website usage (excluding the forums and any place where users are authentified, for example) might still give us some useful data.
From the technical standpoint, web analytics is anonymous by definition (it cannot be different, actually, due to GDPR - at least in Europe). IP addresses are collected in GA by default but users cannot access them (they are used for geographic reports). GA can be setup to not collect IP addresses at all, though.
Dear Clue,
Thanks for asking your questions the way you did, back at the top of the thread. A group of people using a site, if they’re considering changes to it, should IMHO start with the purpose of the site. The main things I use it for are downloads, announcements, user documentation and this discussion forum. I found it using my two standard search tools, DuckDuckGo and StartPage. And that was after running across a YouTube clip suggested to me based on my interest in Linux and open source.
I was in the analytics game 5 years ago, and one of the most interesting stats we looked at each month was which static pages were getting tons of traffic, and which ones got the least. In this way we could go back to the pages that linked to the weaker ones, and try to determine why people weren’t clicking through to them. Another was the percentage of people connecting with desktops vs. mobile devices.
Every bit of informations in a modern web analytics tool is priceless to understand the real behaviours of users in a website. This to improve the website, ofc. No self-hosted, custom-made, hacker-friendly or piwik-esque tools can do the same. They are merely enanched logs (well, maybe piwik is not so bad, after all; but still light years behind).