Hi all, I would like to broach the subject of introducing some sort of analytics package, such as Google Analytics, to the PHP.net website and its sister sites.
I personally believe this would be of huge benefit to lots of us, as currently there is little to no way (that I'm aware of) of viewing useful statistics and metrics on our visitors. Hannes and I spoke about this last night, and he is against the idea of using a third party package to do this, and would rather write something. Personally I think something like Analytics would be far more powerful and versatile than that, and will take a matter of minutes to get up and running. It's also pretty easy to share with anyone who wants to see it. The kind of useful information I'd like to see, which is only what comes to mind initially, I'm sure there's far more once we delve deeper into it: - The docs pages with the highest bounce rates, top x pages. It's likely these don't have the right information, or it could be that it has the best information and that's why people leave quickly. - Docs pages with the longest visit time. Ties in with the above point, and could highlight problems - users could be spending time reading the notes to try and find what they need. - Visibility of our most popular pages - What are people searching for in search engines to find us? Can we identify common user typos and try to handle them better? - What percentages of our users are on X browser version (this would have been valuable when we had our recent design change) - Is there a news item gathering a lot of attention at the moment? Can we identify what makes a news item popular vs something that no one is particularly interested in? - How much traffic do we get across all of the mirrors? Is there a particular mirror that is more popular than others? I believe that metrics like this can help us identify the areas of the site which need more attention, and can benefit everyone involved with the project with their individual tasks. I guess there are a couple of options available to us: 1. Write something ourselves. I doubt this will ever come close to being as detailed as we would like, and the amount of data we would need to store in order to report on certain aspects makes this quite a monumental task. 2. Use Google Analytics, or something similar. Hannes voiced privacy concerns over using Google Analytics, which are concerns I don't share, but it would be great to hear everyone's opinion on it. Thanks, Mike (mikemike) -- Mike Griffiths - Web Dev Weekly <http://webdevweekly.com> mgriffi...@gmail.com
