Are the widgets effective in growing the site?

[garethrees]

Q: Are the widgets effective in growing the site?

[Explain how you will measure this]

Proportion of traffic to site that comes from widgets

[What do we need to do to be able to take the measurements?]

• [x] Add analytics to widgets
• [x] Measure transactions from widgets (WidgetVote.count ?)
• [ ] Measure traffic from widgets (analytics events)

[garethrees]

@lizconlan was working on the analytics bit. Would be good to link to any PRs here.

[garethrees]

Issue: https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/3059 PR: https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/pull/3073

Looks like this has been merged but not sure if its live on AskTheEU – one of the only sites that actively uses widgets.

[garethrees]

Marked as "Done" on the spreadsheet but not sure if we've got any data yet.

[garethrees]

Marking as needs-results because I think that's the next step here (might need to make some deploys in order to do that).

[garethrees]

view-source:http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/1338/widget seems to suggest its live on asktheeu

[lizconlan]

There should be one click for "widget" / "vote" from er, just now. If it doesn't turn up in the Events tracking tomorrow, there's a problem. If it does, it was me checking whether the code worked - ignore it!

[lizconlan]

Ah, there is now one click from March 1 - May 23 and it's mine (the label is the url above), no-one is using it

[garethrees]

Are there any stats on views? (rather than just clicks): /:locale/request/:request_id/widget?

[lizconlan]

March 1 - May 23, 28 Page Views matching "/widget"

...but they're all for the create a widget link (e.g. /en/request/2691/widget/new)

Although rather than suggesting that no-one is viewing them, this may reveal a gap in the tracking data - I don't think the full tracking code is embedded in the widget view. Then again, no-one's taking any notice as there are no clicks.

[lizconlan]

I intentionally visited the widget page for /en/request/2691/widget (within the last 10 minutes, so around 16:00 25 May 2016) so if it doesn't show up in the stats, we're not tracking views for this

[garethrees]

Then again, no-one's taking any notice…

Arguably they would at least be promoting the site.

…as there are no clicks

Looks like the database says otherwise:

foieu=> SELECT COUNT(*), date_trunc('month', created_at) AS created_month
FROM widget_votes
GROUP BY created_month
ORDER BY created_month ASC;
 count |    created_month
-------+---------------------
     8 | 2014-09-01 00:00:00
    25 | 2014-10-01 00:00:00
    21 | 2014-11-01 00:00:00
     9 | 2014-12-01 00:00:00
    15 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00
    13 | 2015-02-01 00:00:00
     9 | 2015-03-01 00:00:00
     7 | 2015-04-01 00:00:00
     7 | 2015-05-01 00:00:00
     9 | 2015-06-01 00:00:00
    12 | 2015-07-01 00:00:00
    10 | 2015-08-01 00:00:00
     6 | 2015-09-01 00:00:00
     1 | 2015-10-01 00:00:00
     2 | 2015-11-01 00:00:00
     8 | 2015-12-01 00:00:00
     2 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00
     4 | 2016-02-01 00:00:00
    28 | 2016-03-01 00:00:00
    23 | 2016-04-01 00:00:00
    16 | 2016-05-01 00:00:00

[lizconlan]

Fun - it looks as though people are sharing the /new link on social media. Not sure why the Events for the votes aren't firing - surely they can't all be people with JavaScript off (or blocked)

[garethrees]

Investigate whether CORS is a problem here.

[lizconlan]

Have stolen this from @Gemmamysoc as it's not the gentle intro to write-ups ticket that we thought it was

[Gemmamysoc]

Thanks @lizconlan :)

[lizconlan]

Investigate whether CORS is a problem here.

Looks like it - the events aren't firing inside the iframe element /o\

[lizconlan]

reading... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14781985/google-analytics-event-not-working-in-iframe

[garethrees]

Write up based on database data because of iframe JS issues.

[Gemmamysoc]

News from Transparencia.be: Between 22 Sept 2016 and 25 Oct 2017 96.26% of all sessions and 91.47% of all new users on Transparencia have come from the widgets on this site: http://nassogne.blogs.sudinfo.be/ Pretty impressive!