In this article I present to the Gridcoin community a summary of the user analytics for the new open source website www.gridcoin.science, with the aim of providing a window into our community and guide further advertising. The repo for this web dev project can be found here, and I would like to personally thank all community members who have already made submissions on the issue tracker. They are all valued and will be addressed in full with the next major update, expected within a week!

It is worth noting that all the following covers traffic generated only through a single link on Steemit through Utopian.io, and a single post on Reddit. I will be interested in seeing how we fare in future. All data was gathered with the help of Google Analytics, and visualised with the respective set of toolboxes. If any of the images are difficult to read on your screen, you can open them in a new tab (right click --> Open image in new tab) to view them at their native resolution.

Graphical Analytics

Average daily users by country

Average daily users by continent

As expected, most of our user-base comes from first world countries, with the highest density around the USA, Europe and Russia. Even so, there were a number of visitors from African countries. Note that some of there origins may be incorrect as a result of users browsing the internet through a proxy server which hides their actual location.

Session statistics by continent

Detailed continental statistics revealed an average of just over 500 sessions per day, with a high bounce rate of over 50%. This is explained by a combination of users browsing anonymously (row 4) as well as a large number of links on the landing of www.gridcoin.science navigating away from the main page. These link point to social media platforms and other media, as well as peripheral resources located elsewhere on the web.

Age demographics (Note: Only 40% of visitors had associated age data)

The age demographics reveal that all of us will be dead by age 54, as no user above that age is still around!

On a more serious note, the average viewer was aged in their mid twenties to mid forties, and male. In fact, every single user that visited the website (and that Google had data on) was identified as male.

Traffic flow through the website.

This is my favourite set of data, overshadowing everything above by a mile. What you are seeing is the traffic flow through the website, beginning with first contact on the left, and then then travelling right. The significant number of users navigating away from the landing, as discussed above, is extremely evident here. It is also interesting to note that the primary topics of interest were the development team, and instructions to begin pool mining.

Use Cases

The data presented will allow us to more closely target advertising for the Gridcoin Research Blockchain through Google Adwords. Currently, this is primarily done through blanket sweeps of specific keywords, but the geographical and age related infomatics data enables more efficient targeting of users that may have an interest in the volunteer compute platform. In the long run, this translates to more compute power being donated to science.

By coupling the data presented with audience interests and affinities, as presented below, the Gridcoin team could reach out even more accurately to their target volunteer audience. These categories will refine and become clearer as more data is gathered over time, but a clear lean towards distributed computing, finance and electronics implies an accurate picture is already building.

For now, the data allows the Gridcoin Adwords campaign to be targeted in one of two directions. Either:

• The target market is refined to geographical areas where there is less saturation right now. This would encourage focus on Africa, Asia and Oceania. By further refining the target audience based on the presented affinities and interests, it will be possible to reach out to people who are very unlikely to have heard of the Research Blockchain as of yet.

• The target market could alternatively be refined to the Americas, Europe and Russia. While there is already higher user saturation registered there, it may be possible that the populations of these regions are more inclined to support volunteer compute. This falls in line with the average middle aged person in this latter geographical category being statistically more likely to be well off, and thus able to afford to donate resources to a good cause.

Note that all this data is gathered as part of your browsing history for practically any website you visit. While it is not possible to identify individual users for website admins, Google does exactly this. If you do not wish to allow data like this to be gathered on you, I recommend you switch to an anonymous browser like Tor which makes you untraceable on the internet.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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