Re: Download Analytics

[Alex Harui <ah...@adobe.com>]

I don’t know much about analytics, but I’ve noticed that search engines
use a redirect to (I think) capture analytics on the search.  In other
words, a search result page for “Flex” will have a link that will
eventually take you to flex.a.o, but it actually hits some URL at the
search engine company with a URL param that includes flex.a.o.  I was
wondering if the insert Ted mentions would automatically do this redirect
or if we could modify the cgi script to add that search-engine like
redirect to each of the links to the mirrors and get better data.

Or here’s another idea: what if instead of using cgi directly we used
Flex?  It could call the cgi and present the mirror options and hit a
tracking URL for each mirror just like we do for the installer.

-Alex

On 10/20/14, 9:33 PM, "Justin Mclean" <ju...@classsoftware.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>> The Drill download page has a google Analytics insert on it.  I think
>>that
>> will hook the clicks that link to the CGI.
>
>Our download pages do have google analytics in them and the in page
>analytics give some info  on links but it's limited and as far as I'm
>aware it only record clicks on links that are within the site and all the
>download links are show as 0%.
>
>> Also, the middle link for "Direct File Download" is to a CDN which has
>> full analytics. 
>
>We would need to add the download files to a CDN for this to work and
>even then it still wouldn't give us the number for downloads from the
>Apache mirrors.
>
>The download pages do see a reasonable amount of traffic. For this year
>rough numbers:
>SDK binaries 20,000 views
>SDK source 15,000 views
>SDK utilities 10,000 views
>Flex JS 8,000 views
>FlexUnit 4,000 views
>Tour De Flex 1000 views
>FalconJX 500 views
>Squiggly 300 views
>
>Currently I think the best we can do is say a few % (5% perhaps?) of
>people that go to the download page actually download something. But
>people can still get our code off a mirror or other download site without
>us knowing about it. There's even a node JS utility to download Apache
>Flex [1] and this page states there's been 2,500 download of the 4.13 SDK
>from it [2].
>
>FlexJS does seem to be getting a lot more views of the download page than
>installs via the installer when compared to our other software. There was
>a very large spike when Flex JS was first released an the first month or
>so ( > 1/3 the total views) but has been slowly tapering off since then.
>
>Justin
>
>1. https://github.com/JamesMGreene/node-flex-sdk
>2. http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/SDK-DDK/Apache-Flex-SDK.shtml