Analytics
Web analytics means tracking website users and deriving insights or value from those data.
Contents
Local Tools[edit | edit source]
An excellent program for analytics is AWStats. The nice thing about AWStats, aside from it being free open-source software, is that it's locally installed on your system and so there is no third party. You have your stats, and nobody else does.
Another excellent tool for analytics is Piwik. Again, Piwik is hosted on your own infrastructure so nobody else has your data.
Open Web Analytics is another Open Source option and has nice features [1] like JavaScript heatmaps. The website looks a bit dated, but the project seems to be active on GitHub, where the documentation lives in the wiki. https://github.com/padams/Open-Web-Analytics/ OWA has integrations for Drupal, MediaWiki and WordPress
wp:Webtrends is a commercial product and is focused on the SaaS model, but it supposedly is still available as a software product.
Services[edit | edit source]
Most Analytics systems today are offered as a service. Chief among those is Google Analytics (or GA for short). However, Google isn't the only game in town. An interesting complement or alternative is HubSpot.
WikiMedia Foundation Analytics[edit | edit source]
- https://analytics.wikimedia.org/ Great stats on OS, browser, editors, page views, and many dashboards for Wikimedia Foundation projects.
- Lots of Kibana powered dashboards https://wikimedia.biterg.io/app/kibana#/dashboards?_g=h@44136fa
- https://wikimedia.biterg.io/app/kibana#/dashboard/Overview?_g=h@44136fa&_a=h@cb9eb2e
- The GitHub (clone) of the Wikimedia MediaWiki project provides insights to the Contributors https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/graphs/contributors
- The pingback service relies on $wgPingback to power the graphs at https://pingback.wmflabs.org/#unique-wiki-count These graphs are anonymous basic system information such as MediaWiki version, OS, PHP version, database, etc. The web installer asks if you want to opt-in. The tarball/git source defaults to "off". It would be nice if this defaulted to 'on' so we could get more accurate statistics.
- The extjsonuploader tool https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tool:Extjsonuploader https://extjsonuploader.toolforge.org/ makes all MediaWiki extensions' metadata available in Lua or JSON. It is used on mediawiki.org to power the infoboxes with info about popularity etc.
In-wiki Analytics[edit | edit source]
To implement Google Analytics in your wiki, you should not use the googleAnalytics extension or others as they have some shortcomings pointed out by Dantman. Instead, he offers up a better approach: putting the code right in your LocalSettings file.
Analyzing your competitors[edit | edit source]
A few sites provide insights to any public website.
Enterprise Analytics[edit | edit source]
There are of course larger analytics platforms or services for enterprise customers. E.g. https://www.ibm.com/analytics/watson-analytics/ from IBM
