[ocaml-infra] ocaml.org on 1st page of google query for ocaml.

Sat Jan 19 16:00:52 GMT 2013

Hop, hop:

*.ocamlcore.org:
http://www.ocamlcore.org/statistics/
Although, I think the fact that everything is behind a reverse proxy screw
up a little bit the stats (all website have exactly 2 visitors each month
that is one of the reason I would like to use analytics rather than
awstats).

ocamlwebsite account?
Not sure, it is labelled "ocamlpro" for me and I have no access to
ocamlwebsite.

2013/1/19 Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975 at gmail.com>

> An interesting comparison would be to how many visitors caml.inria.frused to get vs what
> ocaml.org is getting. The Inria site has statistics somewhere, but I
> can't find them now.
>
> Amir, Sylvain, do you have access to the ocamlwebsite account? How are you
> seeing the statistics otherwise? It might be good for us to make the
> analytics public, if google allows that.
>
>  The configuration also still refers to ocaml-lang.org. I'll see if that
> can be updated.
>
> -Ashish
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain at le-gall.net>wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> 2013/1/19 Amir Chaudhry <amc79 at cam.ac.uk>
>>
>>>
>>> On 19 Jan 2013, at 09:43, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain at le-gall.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> > 2013/1/18 Amir Chaudhry <amc79 at cam.ac.uk>
>>> >> I'd be wary of drawing too many conclusion from this just yet.
>>>  There's no testing going on regarding intent so those could be anything
>>> from casual drive-by visitors to hard-core users.  All we can say is that
>>> 1/3rd of visitors to the ocaml.org site are using Windows.
>>> >
>>> > Well, guessing intent from stats is kind of hard. I mean, you CANNOT
>>> do that even after a long period of time. All these are just clues, you
>>> must make guess on the stats.
>>> >
>>> > I would be deeply surprised that we got a lot of "drive-by
>>> visitors"... You cannot really end up on the front page of ocaml.orgjust as you will end-up on a Facebook page. The
>>> ocaml.org website doesn't really have catch all words/sentences.
>>>
>>> Perhaps I shouldn't call them 'drive-by', so how about 'first-time,
>>> unique'? I didn't mean to suggest these are people who got there by
>>> accident, but that they were simply 'having a quick look'.  ~60% of the
>>> words that people put into google before arriving at the site are unknown
>>> to us ("Keyword not provided") so we don't necessarily know how people find
>>> their way there.
>>>
>>> Aside: I did some searching about this and found a blog post that was
>>> enlightening:
>>> http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3798-Google-Analytics-Overcoming-Not-Provided-Keywords
>>>
>>>
>> OK, on "first time, unique" (better than drive-by in my mind). Although,
>> I would consider them as the target of of ocaml.org (i.e. a way to
>> publicize more OCaml). So having a lot of "first time, unique" is a good
>> thing.
>>
>>
>>> >> Also bear in mind that stats like this might be skewed by population
>>> size.  It doesn't surprise me at all that there are a lot of US visitors.
>>>  Having said that, I don't know what Google Analytics does in the
>>> background to mitigate this (if at all).
>>> >
>>> > What do you want to mitigate ? If there are a lot of US visitors, you
>>> won't divide the number of US visitors…
>>>
>>> I don't want to mitigate.  I wasn't sure if we're seeing the raw numbers
>>> or the numbers after some behind-the-scenes google manipulations (which I
>>> doubt in this case). See also search trends [1], which indicates that over
>>> the last 90 days, France is doing the most searching for 'OCaml'.  I've no
>>> idea how google works this out and whether they account for overall search
>>> volume somehow.
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ocaml
>>>
>>>
>> Why Google would change any numbers?
>>
>> Anyway, I can tell you that some stuff are filtered out:
>> - browser without JavaScript
>> - robots
>>
>> But, you expect this people to be filtered out.
>>
>> Concerning France, I 100% agree on the fact that there is a problem here.
>> I don't have any clear explanation/hyptothesis on this topic.
>>
>>
>>> >
>>> >> Anecdote: One of the things a startup friend told me is that when
>>> your browser visits start matching the ratio of overall browser market
>>> share, then you can consider yourself as breaking out of the
>>> 'echo-chamber'.  This used to mean going from Firefox-heavy traffic to
>>> IE-heavy traffic (Chrome may have changed things since then).
>>> >
>>> > That probably stands for general purpose web sites -- which is not the
>>> case of ocaml.org.
>>>
>>> Why shouldn't a programming language website (ultimately) have a broad
>>> set of visitors? You've already pointed out the large number of Windows
>>> visitors so I don't think it's a stretch to consider this a general purpose
>>> website (in time).  Those figures are related to the OSes people browse
>>> from, which are not necessarily where they do their OCaml hacking.
>>>
>>> I'd be curious to know what the figures look like for Haskell.org (I've
>>> sent an email so will let folks know if/when I hear back).
>>>
>>
>>
>> ;-)
>>
>>  That a nice wish. Let see what are the haskell number.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> > I would say that what is important is the number of abandonment
>>> ("sorties" in french) from the root page. In the case of "ocaml.org",
>>> 34% abandon from /, 21% goes to install, 14% goes to taste.html... I guess
>>> it shows that we have a lot of people interested enough to discover how to
>>> install OCaml... I think there is a clear intent to discover the OCaml
>>> language when going to ocaml.org.
>>>
>>> Curious to know where you're looking for these figures.  I can see
>>> different pages that state 34% exit rate from root and also 54% exit rate
>>> from root.  I don't see the ones that indicate e.g "21% go to install" so
>>> where should I be looking?
>>>
>>>
>> Here:
>>
>> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=fr&pli=1#report/content-pages/a22552764w54925729p55893860/%3F_r.tabId%3Dnavigationsummary/
>>
>> Contenu -> Toutes les pages -> Recapitulatif de navigation
>>
>> There is an even better way to see it, but there is a problem that should
>> be fixed about the account configuration:
>>
>> https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=fr&pli=1#report/inpage/a22552764w54925729p55893860/
>>
>>
>>> Journeys from the root page are useful but be wary of how we interpret
>>> them.  e.g if it's a great page and 90% of the visitors find exactly the
>>> information they wanted and _leave_ then we have an exit rate of 90%.  If
>>> the page is terrible and 90% of people are frustrated and leave we _still_
>>> have an exit rate of 90%.  It's a silly example but I hope it makes the
>>> point.
>>>
>>> We should also expect people to land directly on pages from search
>>> results (not every journey starts from root).  "OCaml Install" as a search
>>> term has 3 INRIA pages and ocaml.org/install as 4th.  "ocaml tutorial"
>>> sends me to mirror.ocaml.org (top result), with ocaml.org/tutorial as
>>> 3rd.  As more content is tweaked and back-links created, I expect the
>>> relevant ocaml.org pages to rank higher.  My point is that landing
>>> pages are just as important as how people navigate the site and (imho) the
>>> search terms are more indicative of what people were looking for.
>>>
>>>
>> I am not sure to understand what you expect but I am pretty sure you
>> won't find the answer to questions like "exit rate is high because people
>> find the info" or "exit rate is high because people don't like the page" in
>> the stats. You can run a poll, but you'll have another bias in the
>> population that reply.
>>
>> So whatever, a high rank in Google is by itself an achievement and the
>> number of people that visit the site is high. This is good and I think the
>> ocaml.org team is achieving its goal.
>>
>>
>>> Best wishes,
>>> Amir
>>>
>>>
>>> >
>>> > On 18 Jan 2013, at 17:37, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain at le-gall.net> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > > Just had a quick look at the stats, and there are some surprises....
>>> > >
>>> > > Top OS: Windows (33%), then Linux and Mac...
>>> > > Top social referrer: Twitter, then Stack Overflow and G+.
>>> > > Country: US (27%), France (12%)
>>> > >
>>> > > Here are the fact I am surprised about:
>>> > > - people seems to think that the OCaml community is UNIX centric...
>>> seems to be not that true (at least 1/3 are not using UNIX based system)
>>> > > - I was expecting to see reddit in the top social referrer and G+
>>> far below.... this is not the case
>>> > > - I was expecting to see at least France in top position here.
>>> > >
>>> > > Overall I am surprised by this stats. I think we should take another
>>> look in 6 months.
>>> > >
>>> > >
>>> > >
>>> > > 2013/1/18 Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain at le-gall.net>
>>> > > BTW, I am planning to setup analytics as well to forge.(SOON TO BE).
>>> ocaml.org and planet.ocaml.org, maybe it makes sense to have all this
>>> stats in one place (i.e. the analytics account where ocaml.org is
>>> already hosted).
>>> > >
>>> > >
>>> > > 2013/1/18 Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas.gazagnaire at gmail.com>
>>> > > > Comes up 2nd for me, right after the wikipedia page (3rd if you
>>> count the Jane Street add at the top).
>>> > > > 4th-7th are INRIA sites, 8th is Jane Street's OCaml page, 9th is
>>> the OCaml Labs homepage and 10th is Planet OCaml.
>>> > > >
>>> > > > Also, google.com redirects me to google.co.uk (seems I can't
>>> choose anymore).
>>> > > >
>>> > > > Traffic stats would be interesting but even more so would be how
>>> people currently find their way to ocaml.org and which pages they land
>>> on.  I'm curious to know the ratio of direct visits (typing ocaml.orginto the browser) vs  people who follow links.  Of those that follow links,
>>> who are the referrers.
>>> > >
>>> > > We have set-up google analytics for ocaml.org, I'm happy to give
>>> access to the stats to anyone interested (I don't know if it's easy to
>>> export the data).
>>> > >
>>> > > Thomas
>>> > >
>>> > >
>>> > > >
>>> > > > ac
>>> > > >
>>> > > > On 18 Jan 2013, at 15:26, Sylvain Le Gall <sylvain at le-gall.net>
>>> wrote:
>>> > > >
>>> > > >> Hi,
>>> > > >>
>>> > > >> Just want to drop a mail to say that ocaml.org is now on first
>>> page
>>> > > >> http://www.google.com/#q=ocaml
>>> > > >>
>>> > > >> It is the 4th entry after caml.inria.fr and wikipedia.
>>> > > >>
>>> > > >> This is VERY good (never achieved this with the forge). It is the
>>> same for bing.
>>> > > >>
>>> > > >> Ashish do you have some Google Analytics setup to track the
>>> number of visitors ? I would be very interested to see the traffic.
>>> > > >>
>>> > > >> Regards
>>> > > >> Sylvain
>>> > > >> _______________________________________________
>>> > > >> Infrastructure mailing list
>>> > > >> Infrastructure at lists.ocaml.org
>>> > > >> http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/infrastructure
>>> > > >
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>>> > >
>>> > >
>>> >
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>>> >
>>>
>>>
>>
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