I don’t know much about analytics, but I’ve noticed that search engines use a redirect to (I think) capture analytics on the search. In other words, a search result page for “Flex” will have a link that will eventually take you to flex.a.o, but it actually hits some URL at the search engine company with a URL param that includes flex.a.o. I was wondering if the insert Ted mentions would automatically do this redirect or if we could modify the cgi script to add that search-engine like redirect to each of the links to the mirrors and get better data.
Or here’s another idea: what if instead of using cgi directly we used Flex? It could call the cgi and present the mirror options and hit a tracking URL for each mirror just like we do for the installer. -Alex On 10/20/14, 9:33 PM, "Justin Mclean" <[email protected]> wrote: >Hi, > >> The Drill download page has a google Analytics insert on it. I think >>that >> will hook the clicks that link to the CGI. > >Our download pages do have google analytics in them and the in page >analytics give some info on links but it's limited and as far as I'm >aware it only record clicks on links that are within the site and all the >download links are show as 0%. > >> Also, the middle link for "Direct File Download" is to a CDN which has >> full analytics. > >We would need to add the download files to a CDN for this to work and >even then it still wouldn't give us the number for downloads from the >Apache mirrors. > >The download pages do see a reasonable amount of traffic. For this year >rough numbers: >SDK binaries 20,000 views >SDK source 15,000 views >SDK utilities 10,000 views >Flex JS 8,000 views >FlexUnit 4,000 views >Tour De Flex 1000 views >FalconJX 500 views >Squiggly 300 views > >Currently I think the best we can do is say a few % (5% perhaps?) of >people that go to the download page actually download something. But >people can still get our code off a mirror or other download site without >us knowing about it. There's even a node JS utility to download Apache >Flex [1] and this page states there's been 2,500 download of the 4.13 SDK >from it [2]. > >FlexJS does seem to be getting a lot more views of the download page than >installs via the installer when compared to our other software. There was >a very large spike when Flex JS was first released an the first month or >so ( > 1/3 the total views) but has been slowly tapering off since then. > >Justin > >1. https://github.com/JamesMGreene/node-flex-sdk >2. http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/SDK-DDK/Apache-Flex-SDK.shtml
