Do we need analytics?

[defeo]

Do we care about how many visits the website gets, from which regions, which platform, etc.?

The usual thing is using Google Analytics, but I personnally tend to dislike Google's approach to data collection. There are FOSS self-hosted alternatives, the most well known being Piwik. Or we might just be content letting our visitors live their own lives untampered.

[fangohr]

I think we need to record visitors, visits, durations etc as much as we can. We don't need to disclose who visited the site (but for example from which country the visitors come), but all these data will be useful metrics in measuring (somehow) the success of the project; at least in units that can be translated into a single number, and are thus useful for reports etc.

I don't mind which technology we use.

[haraldschilly]

Besides Analytics, you should also create accounts at the major search engines to get some additional insights. That's really helpful in figuring out for which keywords the page did shows up in the results, clicks, quality control, crawling errors, etc.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home and http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

[nchauvat]

On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 05:27:46AM -0700, Hans Fangohr wrote:

I think we need to record visitors, visits, durations etc as much as we can. We don't need to disclose who visited the site (but for example from which country the visitors come), but all these data will be useful metrics in measuring (somehow) the success of the project; at least in units that can be translated into a single number, and are thus useful for reports etc.

I don't mind which technology we use.

As Luca said, Piwik is a good solution for this.

Nicolas Chauvat

logilab.fr - services en informatique scientifique et gestion de connaissances

[slel]

+1 analytics

• we get some data about the impact of the project
• useful for reports, future calls for funding, ...
• possibly useful for the social-science research part of the project

+1 open-source tools (consistent with the spirit of the project)

+1 accounts at major search engines
I would complement Harald's list with yandex https://webmaster.yandex.com/