doc: is Google Analytics tracking actually useful?

[ChALkeR]

It has been 1½ years since Google Analytics tracking (for docs) landed in #6601, and perhaps more than a year since it has been actually activated on the website.

The rationale for including it back then was that it should give us information on documentation usage and there were claims that such stats would improve our docs, as far as I remember.

So, the questions are:

1. What data has been collected?
2. Who has it?
3. How was that data used?
4. Has Google Analytics actually proven to be useful for improving the docs over the year?

Refs: #6601, #22595.

/cc @nodejs/documentation @nodejs/website @bnoordhuis @phillipj

[phillipj]

Appreciate you following up 👍

I've never had access and therefore not used them either. I'm thinking someone in the Foundation would have to answer most of your questions, not sure who that might be as I'm not the most active contributor these days.

In addition to the Foundation, I'm pretty sure @fhemberger has had access to most of our Google Analytics stuff?

@feross didn't you also ask for access to docs analytics once? If so, did you even get it and use it for something interesting?

[fhemberger]

Yes, @feross has read access to Google Analytics, otherwise there seems to be only me and a couple of people from the Node.js Foundation. So if any other members need access, please let me know.

These are the top 30 docs pages for the last 30 days:

If you want to know any specific details, please let me know. But as this Google Analytics UI is its own kind of dark sorcery, I'm not very used to it. YMMV. 😀

[feross]

I haven't done anything useful with it yet, but I hope to at some point :)

[addaleax]

The thing is … as @ChALkeR noted, this has been going on for a relatively long time, and the questions in the OP are valid – we trade in a bit of user privacy here, and if we haven’t gotten anything in return or nobody can actually answer the questions above, we should consider just removing this.

[davisjam]

@fhemberger If you have a moment, could you show us how the guides are doing?

(Anything under https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/)

[fhemberger]

@addaleax I think the issue is also that this was set up, but nobody looked at the data ever after. Analytics just for analytics sake.

@davisjam Here are the results for guides (last 30 days, without Google Translate links):

There are a couple auf strange links (spaces, closing braces, etc). But they are coming from external links, not much we can do about this.

[bnoordhuis]

I'm in favor of removing it.

Is the consensus here that it should be removed? If yes, I'll go ahead and do that.

[fhemberger]

I think we can also get stats that might be useful from the server logs, in case we really need them. For example how many doc page impressions per Node.js version, etc.

So I'd be +1 for removing.

[Fishrock123]

Can I get access? I'd like to dig through this a bit to see which pages get inter-doc navigated to the most and which get externally navigated to the most.

[fhemberger]

@Fishrock123 Sure, what's your Google account address? fishrock123​ @ gmail.com?