Different use cases! siderea is asking for an on-DW feature that will tell her information about how many people are reading entries in her journal, and mentions Google Analytics specifically because we do let people add their own Analytics account.
DW uses Google Analytics sitewide to gather browser/OS/connection speed data in aggregate so we know which browsers we need to support and which ones we can drop support for, and we don't add the Analytics script on any individual journals (individual entry pages or the journal as a whole). People can add their own Analytics code to their journal if they want, though, which is what siderea is talking about -- having a DW-native version of stats would provide more useful hit-count data than Analytics could to the journal owner.
Even if we did/do add any kind of DW-native stats system, we'll continue using Analytics (on non-journal pages), because it's an easy way to gather browser/OS/connection speed data without having to build our own and reinvent the wheel.
EDIT: I wandered over to check the DW Analytics results, and some interesting stats:
* 70% of people visit DW on a desktop/laptop; only 30% visit on phone/tablet.
* Chrome is the most popular browser, at 55% of our traffic. Firefox is second at 18%. Safari is third at 17%. Internet Explorer is a very distant fourth -- at 2%!
* 76% of our traffic is returning visitors; 23% is new visitors.
Etc! That kind of information helps us figure out things like "ugh, can we stop supporting older versions of IE yet".
no subject
DW uses Google Analytics sitewide to gather browser/OS/connection speed data in aggregate so we know which browsers we need to support and which ones we can drop support for, and we don't add the Analytics script on any individual journals (individual entry pages or the journal as a whole). People can add their own Analytics code to their journal if they want, though, which is what
Even if we did/do add any kind of DW-native stats system, we'll continue using Analytics (on non-journal pages), because it's an easy way to gather browser/OS/connection speed data without having to build our own and reinvent the wheel.
EDIT: I wandered over to check the DW Analytics results, and some interesting stats:
* 70% of people visit DW on a desktop/laptop; only 30% visit on phone/tablet.
* Chrome is the most popular browser, at 55% of our traffic. Firefox is second at 18%. Safari is third at 17%. Internet Explorer is a very distant fourth -- at 2%!
* 76% of our traffic is returning visitors; 23% is new visitors.
Etc! That kind of information helps us figure out things like "ugh, can we stop supporting older versions of IE yet".