Assignment 7: Analytics.
This assignment was a great idea that seemed to be foisted upon us at a point which was too late and too close to our other projects for us to give it the attention it deserved.
Right off the bat, I can say that analytics require time and planning on the end of the site designers. Since we didn’t have much time, and we sure didn’t have any opportunity to alter Drupal to record custom data, we had to make due with Google Analytics. It could have been worse.
We quickly learned that analytics are not as clear and formulaic as we’d like them to be. We ended up looking at a page where reading is not expected, since it’s a gateway page, so how do we measure how helpful it is? We can’t measure time spent on the page. We have to measure the amount of traffic that ends up on the pages to which the documentation page links, and, ideally, the amount of time spent on those pages.
While analytics are important for measuring a page’s success, this quantitative evaluation method is costly to put into effect, requiring time and skill for implementing a means for data collection, as well as time for the actual data collection. Fortunately, once it IS in place, an analytics system can provide a constant stream of useful statistics and requires only a few people for the actual data analysis.
