[tor-project] About the importance of website metrics

[Nima Fatemi]

Hey there,

I just found out about https://tor-metrics.shinyapps.io/webstats/
through 'boklm' on IRC and after playing around with it for a couple of
mins I found so many important and noteworthy things and it got me
excited too much to not to share it with the list.

Here's just one of the things I noticed. If you look at this graph from
Aug 2016 to Sep 2016 [1], you'll notice that:

- the number of hits on home page are (~55k on average) lower than the
number of hits on download page.

- the number of initial downloads are (~50k on average) lower than
number of hits on download page.

Of course it needs much deeper analysis but that quick look tells me one
of the primary goals of the people who visit Tor Project website seems
to be downloading Tor Browser and a big portion of them fail to do so.
We can definitely use this data while rebuilding the website.

You might say it's obvious that the download of our primary product on
the website, but it's something else when you can measure it with actual
data. Specially when things aren't as good as their potential and when
there's room to improve.

This is really exciting and amazing work. Kudos to metrics team and
Sebastian for providing anonymized webstats and visualizing them.

PS: I've a question: how often do the web stats get pushed? seems like
the last push was on Sep 15th. And whether it's possible to have them in
a closer-to-real-time basis. (ie. once a day).

PPS: Apologies about the cross-post. It seemed like this email is valid
for all three lists, and members don't necessarily overlap.

[1] https://people.torproject.org/~nima/ux/home_dl-page_dl.png

Cheers,
-- 
Nima
0X58C4B928A3E218F6 | @mrphs

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it" --Evelyn Beatrice Hall

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