As a founder of another service, http://bitdeli.com, that provides analytics for GitHub, I would be curious to hear what kind of analytics would you like to get for your repos?
There are a number of GitHub-specific metrics that we could add, like being able to track the number of forks / stars.
We will be adding weekly email reports soon - what metrics would you like to see included?
Can everyone please just stop using google analytics
Webserver logs give you all the information you should want about how users look at your page, and don't violate your users' privacy by notifying a third-party advertising company about their browsing habits.
I don't think github gives users access to the logs. Also, Google Analytics provides a more convenient way of looking through the data, more information, and alerts. It also lets you view the data for multiple sites at once.
Google Analytics and the rest do more than just log web traffic details. They also offer event tracking and real-time stats, with a decent UI, so that your marketing director or boss can easily jump in and check things out.
I realize there are similar offerings that don't require a third party but I don't see them as equal alternatives.
Server logs display requests that reach the server. This has the potential to become problematic if you have an intermediary proxy of some sort (CDN, cache, SaaS based proxy) which you may or may not get access logs from. GA, or any java-script based snippet, has the potential to be more accurate in that sense.
No need to buy anything, it's an MIT-licensed project, and a trivial implementation under the hood to boot. If I wasn't learning Go while writing it, I think it would take all of 5-10 minutes to replicate (including deploying to prod)... :-)
What I wish GitHub would do is allow us to specify our own GA profile in project settings and just add an extra two lines of JavaScript in their pages to beacon the right metrics directly to GA. They're already using GA on their pages, so adding an additional profile is trivial. [1]
A proper GA integration would eliminate the need to proxy requests, and give us (repo owners) more metrics: I'm most interested in referral information - aka, how are people finding my repo. Also, it would enable analytics on all pages (e.g. source files, etc).
GA is available on GitHub pages, there's an input for the ID in the settings. GitHub doesn't use GA, so there's also no need to implement two trackers, having an input for a GA ID in the repository settings would be enough.
Personally, I don't think Analytics is a good measurement of a project on GitHub, I would be more inclined to look at the number of clones, forks, downloads from the releases page, pull requests, and the number of commits being made.
https://github.com/blog/1672-introducing-github-traffic-anal...