Collecting and reporting visitor statistics

[danielvartan]

Hi,

I recently moved my package to rOpenSci. All things worked as described, but the Google Analytics tracking are not showing up in the code. Is there something I miss?

The package documentation website can be found at https://docs.ropensci.org/mctq/ .

Cheers!

[jeroen]

We deliberately do not support google analytics in our template. @maelle

[danielvartan]

I see. Do you guys suggest some other solution for web analytics?

[maelle]

@jeroen should we make it possible to override that? E.g. with pkgdown dev version (to be released in the next couple of weeks)

template:
  includes:
    in_header: <!-- inserted at the end of the head -->
  package: rotemplate

Would work. Now the question is, how much use of the template field does our docs building system enable?

---

@danielvartan we use Matomo Analytics. What data would you like us to provide, what did you monitor with Google Analytics? Not promising a report in the very short term, but definitely interested in listing requirements & in working on it.

[jeroen]

I don't think it fits in our privacy policy to allow 3rd party trackers to be embedded under our .ropensci.org domains.

[maelle]

now that's a good point! 😬

So let's focus on making a list of what data package authors would like to see summarized regularly.

[danielvartan]

Hi @maelle ,

I'm interested in just some basic visitor data (e.g., frequency of unique visitors, geographical location, most visited pages, traffic acquisition, bounce rate). The objective is to measure user engagement to try optimize the user experience.

[maelle]

Thanks @danielvartan! What time resolution were you previously using? Did you have some sort of custom report you could share? (no worries if not!)

[danielvartan]

A 1-month window usually. I don't have a report to share (sorry!).

[maelle]

So a report with data aggregated by month, correct?

Thank you!

Out of curiosity, in the past, did the data help you make a practical decision? (no worries if not!)

[danielvartan]

I can't remember any direct practical design decision I made with this data. I use mostly for insights.

For example, by knowing the geographical location of the users, I can direct or redirect my promotion efforts to some places, by choosing to promote the package in specific circles.

The aggregated data also helps me to measure the impact of the package. This is important to show, for example, to funding agencies and to assure the community itself that can benefit from using the package.

[maelle]

Re-opening as we need to sort out the reporting, and as the other issue where I track this is private.

[jeroen]

OK let's update the title then

[maelle]

I'm not forgetting this but work on this will have to happen in 2022. Thanks for your patience!