TIL: A few ways to track web traffic for open source projects

Understanding how people discover and navigate your project’s web presence is valuable for open source communities, but there are a lot of options out there and many maintainers may not know about them. Recently Chris did some research to improve the web analytics for Jupyter, and learned about several options for tracking web traffic¹. Here’s a quick report of what stood out.

Three analytics tools we found helpful #

Plausible.io - A privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant analytics service

• Clean interface with public dashboards (see Jupyter’s dashboard)
• Paid service but offers 15% discount for open source projects
• Cost scales with traffic volume. It can get expensive for a project as big as Jupyter!
• This is the service we ultimately ended up using…

ReadTheDocs Analytics - Built-in traffic tracking for documentation sites

• Available as a free add-on for ReadTheDocs projects, it provides traffic data specific to documentation pages.
• There’s no additional cost if already using ReadTheDocs, though if you’re on a business plan you may need to pay for it.
• The analytics are a bit barebones, but quite useful for learning where your readers are navigating.
• Enable in Settings > Addons > Analytics.

GitHub Repository Analytics - Native analytics in GitHub.

• Shows clones, views, and referring sites. This is also fairly barebones, but it’s really useful to see who is actually looking at your repository.
• Free for all GitHub repositories.
• Access via Insights > Traffic on any repository.

Learn more #

• GitHub issue coordinating Jupyter’s analytics work
• Plausible.io public dashboard for jupyter.org (this might be down for now, but we’re working to bring it back up)
• ReadTheDocs Analytics documentation
• GitHub Traffic Analytics API

Acknowledgements #

Thanks in particular to Jason Grout from the Jupyter Executive Council for collaborating on this investigation and helping test these tools.