Google analytics makes pretty graphs

A couple of days ago, we enabled Google Analytics on the postgresql.org website (possibly temporary, haven't decided on that yet) to collect some statistics primarily about the languages our visitors have configured in their browsers. The method google uses (client-side javascript) makes it very easy to integrate in our distributed platform with 4 different mirrors handling the main site, spread across the world.

And I have to say, it certainly makes for some pretty graphs that I'm sure would impress the hell out of a lot of PHBs and market analysts. Take this, for example:

It shows the languages of people visiting the postgresql.org website, with a highlight on the people who prefer Japanese.

The statistics themselves are also very interesting - only (and I do think this is only) just over half the visitors have english configured as their primary language. No other languages are very big, but there are a lot of them (107 combinations in total). The most common other languages (German, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, French) are not very surprising either, given how our community looks.

One interesting piece of statistics around the languages is that for the mailinglist archives, it's very different - English is of course even more common, almost all other languages are less common, but Spanish increases up to about 10%25. I have no explanation for this, but it's interesting..

When you instead look at the top URLs, there's some further interesting stuff going on:

Not surprising, the frontpage is the most loaded page. And the main docs page is second, with a couple of different download links following that. However, in 7th place with 1.6%25 of the total pagehits is the download for 8.2.3 win32 binaries. That's more than the people browsing for source, let alone those who download it. And this does not include the people who just grab it from their local mirror. Interesting.

The final piece of statistics today will be browsers and platforms used. First, browser:

Not really surprising, Firefox is the big leader, with well over 50%25. Internet Explorer has about a third of our visitors. Most other browsers are very small.

Now, moving on to platforms:

Slightly more surprising here. Even though PostgreSQL is very Unix-centric, we still have almost three quarters of our visitors using Windows. Unlike many other sites, though, we have a lot more Linux users than Mac - but that comes with the usage pattern.

We've also got NTT DoCoMo showing up as a top browser, which is also interesting. I beleive that's a mobile phone browser used in Japan. Our site is definitly not mobile-adapted, but obviously good enough for some.

That ends todays list of (possibly meaningless) statistics and pretty graphs.


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