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A Pinout.xyz Statistics Introspective
Pinout has grown beyond my initial hacked-together mess into a beautiful community project, I no longer think of it as "mine" but rather "ours."
Pinout collects usage stats via Google Analytics. The reason behind this is a mix of my own personal vanity, a background in marketing and PR, and a real need to understand how people use the site and features so we know how, when and where to improve it and what's most deserving of our limited time and attention.
Since moving away from pi.gadgetoid.com and becoming its own brand in early November 2015, Pinout has seen:
- 291,000+ sessions
- 165,000+ users
- 1,182,000+ page views
- Slightly over 4 pages per session
- 2:52 seconds average session duration
Right now, in October 2016 we're seeing about 1000 unique users a day who view on average 3.76 pages and spend 2:48 on Pinout.xyz.
Habits change over time, and so does Pinout, so we're going to look at just September 2016 to see what people did on the site.
- The overwhelming majority of page views, 19.66%, were to the home page. This isn't surprising. This is what Pinout.xyz was originally intended for!
- The most popular "pin" page was Ground, with 5.78% of page views
- WiringPi is still in business, with 3.66% of page views!
- The boards page only had 2.7% of page views, we're keen to grow as a "discovery tool" for cool new add-ons!
- Some of our least viewed URLs are just weird. Seriously. What are you people doing!?
So what about October 2016 to date?
- WiringPi claims 3.76% of page views. It's the third most visited page next to the homepage and ground
- The boards page has 3.44% of page views, yay! You're using it! Thank you.
- Sense HAT is one of the most popular boards pages. Most people are finding it on Google, or coming to it directly.
Our top visitors hail from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, India, the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Spain and Poland. I suspect these figures, crossed with the population of these places, might tell some interesting tales about the spread of Raspberry Pi around the world. I hope to find the time to tell them someday!
Who sends us traffic? Search engines. Mostly.
Looking back at September 2016:
- 45.57% of visits came from search
- 43.71 from "direct", which could mean myriad things but includes people who type in the URL or use bookmarks
- 9.45% were referred from blogs, forums, tutorials, guides, etc. Thank you!
- 1.27% came from social media. Aww, nobody talks about us? :D
Too many to list. But it's a favourite past-time of mine to browse the referring URLs for interesting content and tweet about it.
- duckduckgo is usually number one, because Google apparently refuse to believe it's a search engine?
- forums.pimoroni.com is normally in the top three
- t.co, the Twitter URL shortening service, is hiding all the Twitter referrals
- raspberrypi.stackexchange.com is usually about number 5
- raspberrypi.org forums and documentation crop up in the top 10 often
- rs-online.com is in the top 10 from this article alone: https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/hello-proto-the-latest-accessory-from-pi-top
- sudomod.com seems to be a top 10 mainstay, and is totally worth checking out
- github.com because a lot of projects link Pinout.xyz in code or README's
- bennet.org's detailed Terrarium Controller guide: http://bennet.org/blog/raspberry-pi-terrarium-controller/
- blog.chrisbriggsy.com
- anwaarullah.com/blog/category/raspberry-pi/
Everyone wants to know this for some reason. The browser wars are enduring, and every website tells a different story depending on what kind of users it attracts. We're all about geeks, so these figures should surprise nobody :D
Since we moved to Pinout.xyz in November 2015:
- 53.79% of our users are reported as using Google Chrome,
- 22.34% for Firefox,
- 14.29% for Safari,
- 4.19% for Internet Explorer
Only 7.3% of visits are from mobile phones, and 4.7% from tablets. It's pretty clear the site isn't quite as friendly as it could be for these devices!
- 55.39% of people use Windows... no surprise there!
- 18.15% use Macintosh, OSX, macOS, whatever it's called!
- 14.21% use Linux
Well, I suppose now almost 100% of them use Linux ;)
We don't attempt to collect Demographic or Interest data. Using Google Analytics is already somewhat frowned-upon in the geekaverse, so that's a line in the sand I think most of you wouldn't want us to cross.
Not so long ago, we made a big push to localise Pinout.xyz since we believed while the Pi was slowly making its way into the far corners of the world, we should follow suit. Yes, most of you speak fantastic English, but that doesn't mean we should take that for granted. Translating Pinout.xyz has been tricky, and maintaining it even more so. The clunky mess of static site generation, template files and markdown files really doesn't lend itself well to such a practise. The folks localising Pinout.xyz are therefore, frankly, heroes tolerating an awful mess and moving goalposts. We can't thank them enough!
The localised sites are still very new, mostly quite outdated and haven't really had their chance to shine, but people do use them.
Due to some problems with broken tracking code, I'll be looking at July 2016 for these brief overview figures and using the latest figures for French. Take them all with a pinch of salt!:
- German: 1,324 visits, 1:29 average time
- Spanish: 396 visits, 2:29 average time
- French: Had broken tracking for a long time! But since it's fix in October has had 195 visits, 4:07 average time
- Italian: 509 visits, 2:43 average time
- Turkish: 90 visits. 1:28 average time
German figures are unsurprising. It's the third most popular country for the English site.
None. Nada. Nil. Zip. Pinout.xyz is run at a loss roughly equal to the cost of the domain renewal and, if you want to get pedantic, the hours we put in multiplied by how much we value our time.
It's only by the good graces of Pimoroni, and the free Cloudflare service, that we don't have a hosting bill.
Now, I'll get all frank and serious here. I'm not rolling in cash and more than once I've wondered how I might monetise Pinout. I always stop short and remind myself of my opening statement; Pinout isn't mine to monetise, or to solicit donations from. It's "ours." Although not legally declared as such, it's a little bit the property of everyone who takes the time to submit a PR and is accepted.
Stats stats stats. They're the marmite of the webmastering world.
Sorry for the use of both "I" and "we" in this document. It's deliberate and, I hope, not outrageously confusing.