spring/spring-website — pull request #12 by adelq (2011-12-31 18:24:09+00:00)
Title: Add piwik web analytics to springrts website

First, we need web analytics. As far as I can tell, there is no form of analytics at all on the website, which is absolutely necessary. We need web analytics to see from which countries we are getting traffic from, and then maybe offering translations if there is overwhelming traffic from non-English speaking countries. Another thing is seeing what content users are leaving on, so we can improve those pages ex: if 90% of users leave on the media page, then you know something needs to be improved. Another thing is knowing what content users need the most and are looking for, and then adjusting the organization of the website so that those come up first. So we REALLY need analytics, not only for improving the website, but also for seeing general trends, like seeing if advertising campaigns are actually working or not.

So since we need analytics, we need to choose one. First, we needed something that was open source, which only 2 analytics reach this criterion, Piwik and Open Web Analytics. However, Piwik is much more powerful, more popular, and with Piwik, all the data is hosted on our own server, nothing leaves it, and we own all of the data and is easy to export, so the data can't be outsourced like Google Analytics or Clicky.

Hopefully you can see my rationale for adding analytics to the website. All of the data is collected anonymously, and will only be used for improving the website and other purposes. Obviously, the devs will all have privileges on the analytics, and perhaps we can do a "State of SpringRTS" monthly report to see how we are doing.