Anything meaningful in the drop from #200 to #240 position in global Alexa rank? http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/commons.wikimedia.org We know Alexa has many deficiencies, can HTTPS/HSTS have disrupted their statistics?
Nemo
Hm... interesting. It seems to coincide pretty well with the pageviews drop:
https://vital-signs.wmflabs.org/#projects=commonswiki/metrics=Pageviews
But that was explained to me as "we started filtering spiders better". So I don't think that would affect Alexa's numbers but maybe it's a bad coincidence that around the same time something else happened that dropped the numbers. And the convolution made us all miss it.
On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Anything meaningful in the drop from #200 to #240 position in global Alexa rank? http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/commons.wikimedia.org We know Alexa has many deficiencies, can HTTPS/HSTS have disrupted their statistics?
Nemo
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Dan Andreescu, 18/11/2015 22:32:
But that was explained to me as "we started filtering spiders better". So I don't think that would affect Alexa's numbers but maybe it's a bad coincidence that around the same time something else happened that dropped the numbers. And the convolution made us all miss it.
Or maybe the Alexa stats contained the same filtering error and fixed it at the same time as us! Sounds unlikely.
Nemo
In general, we struggle with these external sources of information. (And this extends to the industry in general). The Research team expended a lot of energy to correct the way another service interpreted our traffic and I believe this feedback was not incorporated.
We are public with our page views and the Analytics team and Erik have now updated wikistats so I am reasonable comfortable in being able to assess month to month changes.
-Toby
On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 1:50 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Dan Andreescu, 18/11/2015 22:32:
But that was explained to me as "we started filtering spiders better". So I don't think that would affect Alexa's numbers but maybe it's a bad coincidence that around the same time something else happened that dropped the numbers. And the convolution made us all miss it.
Or maybe the Alexa stats contained the same filtering error and fixed it at the same time as us! Sounds unlikely.
Nemo
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
On 18 November 2015 at 15:07, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org wrote:
In general, we struggle with these external sources of information. (And this extends to the industry in general). The Research team expended a lot of energy to correct the way another service interpreted our traffic and I believe this feedback was not incorporated.
Indeed. From that site specifically:
"Not all websites implement our on-site analytics and publish the results. For these sites, we show estimated metrics based on traffic patterns across the web as a whole. We identify these patterns by looking at the activity of millions of web users throughout the world, and using data normalization to correct for any biases."
With regards to this specific topic, Discovery is starting to explore metrics like what percentage of our traffic comes from referrers. You can see our efforts on https://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/. Developing this dashboard is a secondary priority for the Discovery Analysis Team right now; we're prioritising more directly supporting our product development with A/B test analysis and dashboarding.
Thanks, Dan