Managing the whitelassi project using Google Analytics

Managing an open source project gets easier, when you get to use cool tools such as Google Analytics

I have been monitoring WhiteLassi’s source code repository using Google Analytics service. It provides me with detailed metrics about the project’s visitors and the most browsed and popular content.

Attaching some screenshots of the same :

I get to see detailed metrics about the visitor overview on the GoogleCode project SVN as shown below:

It provides me with a lot of metrics regarding the source of the visits, the aveage pageviews, the viewing time of each page as shown above. I can click on each metric and view more details.

The map overlay feature also lets me know the location of each of the visitors that visited my open source project as shown below:

I also get to see detailed metrics regarding the individual content on the source code repository, by making use of the content mertrics provided by Google Analytics. 

I can browse the content by title (most checked out etc) as shown below. 

I can also view a consolidated report on the content metrics of the project by having a look at the content overview feature, as shown below:

Moreover, there is a feature of finding out the details on how the visitors came using search engine keywords…..as shown below in the screenshot.

It tells me the traffic distribution, in terms of search engine traffic, referrals and direct visits from other sources. I can get more information on each metric:

One of the most important metrics is visitor loyalty. It shows how many visitors actually come back after visiting my project online. A screen shot of this metric is shown below:

A continuous site benchmark regarding the traffic on the project also helps in finding out the overall popularity of the project over a period of time…as shown in the screenshot below:

Overall, Google analytics provides me with some very valuable information regarding the performance of the project, and the visitors to the project. I strongly recommend all open source projects that are hosted on Google Code, to use this tool and get continuous information regarding project metrics.