Nick,
Yes, I have - in fact, I'm using Google Analytics on the /projects/
pages right now to track visitor behavior.
However, I think that basing an improved website on the Analytics data
is like writing tests based on the current code: it allows one to
optimize for the current behavior, but it doesn't verify that the
current behavior is the desired behavior. Good unit test design
involves writing the tests from use-cases and writing the tests first,
then writing the code to achieve those tests. The same applies to our
website: I don't want us to tailor our website to how it being used now
- I want us to tailor it to what we want to accomplish as a
community/Foundation. (For example, if we had tailored Eclipse based on
how it was being used at first, we wouldn't have CDT, PHP, RCP, RAP,
RT, ... - those didn't exist at the time, so if we had "perfected"
Eclipse for the existing uses, we would have made those things nigh
impossible to do.)
So to me the first step is deciding _what_ we want the website to do
for us THEN measuring what our current website _is_ doing for us, and
then figuring out how to improve the current website to move towards
what we want. And deciding what we want from the website includes
figure out what conversions to measure.
Having said all that, of course, I'm a big fan of Google Analytics:
very easy to use, very easy to read the results. Perhaps we should
change the Phoenix skin to include the Google Analytics tag I'm already
using into all the pages?
- Bjorn
Have you ever used Google Analytics? It's meant to track
conversion
rates for ad campaigns, but I've used it to see what the traffic
patterns are on sites
I've built -- entry points, exit points, click tracks (# pages in a
trail &
visit duration), and of course the usual stuff like # of visitors, # of
page
hits & geoIP data.
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