Re-enable site analytics for jupyter.org

[choldgraf]

Next actions

• Decide if it's safe to try Plausible for our web analytics
• Merge Plausible analytics on jupyter.org on a 1-month trial: Add plausible analytics #816
• See our public dashboard here
• Wait a month and see if we generally like the Plausible experience.
• (Late September) Decide what to do next

Context

A few years ago we stopped using Google Analytics due to GDPR concerns. This means that we no longer have information about how people are navigating Jupyter.org (or other jupyter sub-projects). This kind of information is useful for demonstrating reach and impact, and is also useful in guiding Marketing experiments to understand whether we're directing attention to Jupyter resources in expected ways.

I propose that we identify an analytics service we can use with jupyter.org that:

• Is not at-risk of legal challenges relating to GDPR
• Gives us information about traffic flow in/out/through jupyter.org
• Can scale to subproject docs as well
• Does not require significant human time to maintain
• Is not extremely expensive

Idea for implementation

Chris's suggestion: use a plausible.io plan.

Plausible.io is what I've heard most-often recommended here. It is fairly expensive though, and limited to 10 sites for an enterprise plan. They do not have open source or non-profit plans. They have their codebase online and you can self-host it, but I'd strongly suggest we just pay for them.

Anybody know of obvious better alternatives?

I know there are a million analytics services out there. If somebody knows of another one that matches the conditions above and is obviously better than Plausible, then please suggest it! If not obvious, then I'd lean towards "just using plausible" so that we go down a rabbit hold of debate.

Note

Anybody want to advocate for Matomo?

I think that's the most likely alternative, and what the Binder team uses. That said, in Chris' experience the Matomo instance for mybinder.org has been very slow and kind of unreliable.

How to pay for this

I suggest we:

• Ask the Foundation for a discretionary Marketing budget that they + the JMS have control over, and use this to pay for Plausible. If not that, then:
• Use EC discretionary funds for this. If not that, then:
• Write a proposal for the Foundation specifically for this via community proposals.

[jasongrout]

Note that they have a 30-day free trial, no credit card required. We can put them on the website today to experiment.

[jasongrout]

History:

• 2013: The very first issue on this repo (Add Google Analytics #1) was about adding google analytics, which was promptly done
• 2018: anonymize google analytics #279 anonymized google analytics for GDPR
• 2021: remove analytics #408 removed Google Analytics. We had lots of discussion at that time about plausible. In particular, @Carreau mentions that https://views.scientific-python.org/ is an open source server to serve scientific python ecosystem projects.

[jasongrout]

I would extend the "identify an analytics service we can use with jupyter.org" requirement to include something that can potentially scale to our docs as well.

[choldgraf]

Good point @jasongrout - is there any objection to us setting up Plausible analytics to get a baseline for our traffic? This will help us:

• Test the Plausible UI
• Get a baseline for our traffic, which will tell us the likely cost of analytics

To implement this, we'd need to paste the plausible javascript snippet into the of jupyter.org

Also, I'll add your suggestion about scaling to docs in the head.

[jasongrout]

I'm +1 on trying it out with the free trial.

[minrk]

👍 to trying out plausible. Doubly so if we can actually join views.scientific-python.org

[jasongrout]

FYI, there's also some discussion on zulip around this.

[choldgraf]

If anybody wants to action the "trial run", I'm +1 on just merging away and trying this out with Plausible.

[jasongrout]

On it...

[jasongrout]

PR up at #816. It's using a 30-day free trial tied to projectjupyter@gmail.com now.

[yuvipanda]

overall i approve paying for it and not self hosting.