Re: Friends of GNOME June numbers

["Jaap A. Haitsma" <jaap haitsma org>]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 21:13, Claus Schwarm<clschwarm googlemail com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 04:20 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
>> The file is good now.
>>
>> The latest Friends of GNOME numbers are on the wiki,
>>
>> http://live.gnome.org/action/AttachFile/GnomeMarketing/Tasks/FriendsOfGNOME?action=AttachFile
>>
>> As you can see, while we had a good April and a terrific May, June
>> numbers are way down. It underscores why subscriptions are so
>> important - that's the only number that held steady.
>>
>> I think we could use a Friends of GNOME campaign to encourage people
>> to sign up and to get their friends to sign up ...
>>
>
> Well, there are a number of factors. You may like to add some numbers
> from the statistics page of www.gnome.org, available here:
>
> http://www.gnome.org/stats/
>
> I just did and there's several points that might be helpful. First, I
> tried to get a measure of "conversions" of the wgo/friends page, that
> is: I related the number of donors to the number of visitors of the
> wgo/friends page. Here's the result:
>
> Jan 2009    0.92
> Feb 2009    0.61
> Mar 2009    0.70
> Apr 2009    1.42
> May 2009    2.23
> Jun 2009    1.61
>
> Compared to the previous month, the June numbers are not as good, but
> it's still better then Apr 2009!
>
> Unfortunately, the result is bad, overall.
>
> The visitor numbers are taken from a field in the monthly stats called
> "Top 10 of X Total Entry Pages". In other words, that's the number of
> visitors who directly surfed to wgo/friends/ -- probably from the linked
> images, maybe from urls in post on planet.gnome.org, maybe from other
> sources. It probably does not include people who came to /friends/ from
> within wgo!
>
> Thus, it's very likely that the total number of visitors is higher than
> the numbers I could use. The conversion rate is thus lower in reality.
>
> And it's also likely that our first friends-of-gnome campaign just
> reached those people who are very involved in gnome. Of course, their
> number is rather small, so it was to be expected that we could only a
> "spike".
>
> So, the first "result" is this: There are two reasons for the drop in
> June. (1) The average amount of donations dropped. (2) The text on the
> friends page does not "sell". We need to write a better one.
>
>
> Second, let's have a look at what I call "leads": This is the number of
> visitors for wgo/friends/ in relation to the number of visitors of all
> pages under www.gnome.org:
>
> Jan 2009    1.27
> Feb 2009    0.77
> Mar 2009    0.83
> Apr 2009    0.83
> May 2009    1.20
> Jun 2009    0.82
>
> Overall, we don't even get 1 percent of all visitors of the wgo pages to
> look at the wgo/friends page. Maybe, we could improve this one, too?
>
> The reason is not just that there's no visible link on the wgo front
> page to wgo/friends! For if we look at what people really are looking
> for on wgo, it's the project pages! Here are some examples from June:
>
> 259,921 /
>  72,288 /evolution/
>  49,232 /dia/
>  42,528 /NetworkManager/
>  36,877 /totem/
>  36,045 /rhythmbox/
>  35,207 /anjuta/
>  31,205 /tomboy/
>  25,929 /gnumeric/
>  24,462 /epiphany/
>
> Btw, I don't know what's wrong here, but except for gnumeric, they all
> 404'ed! If that's not just due to some problem with Webalizer, there's
> lots of traffic we ignore. Why are there no proper 301 redirects for
> these pages?
>
> So the other "result" is this: We need to plug friends-of-gnome
> images/links on all the project homepages, if we want more leads for the
> wgo/friends/ page, not just the wgo front page. And we need to make
> sure, these urls are redirected.
>
> On a general side note, Webalizer is not really sufficient to track
> stuff like this.
>
Nice analysis but I agree with Clause that we need a better tool. Some
weeks ago there was discussion about installing piwik
http://piwik.org/
The sysadmin team had some security concerns

Stormy do you know what the status is now?

Jaap