I propose that we enable the "New forum topics" block on all module pages for one week only, and use Web Analytics to track its click-through rate. The purpose of this task is to set a baseline for other (hopefully more useful) things that could be displayed in the space, as part of D.O. redesign.

A survey by Dries in year 2007 showed that "module recommendation" was the #1 request by D.O. users. Innovations such as the "pivots" recommendation system (http://mrzhou.cms.si.umich.edu/taxonomy/term/7) has been developed that display useful links on module pages, to both forum posts and other modules. But how will we know whether those links are useful or not? Given limited space on a module page, we assume that a set of links is more useful than another set of links, if it invites more clicks.

So, I propose to use the "New forum topics" block as the comparison base line, enable it on module pages for one week, and collect its click-through rate using Web Analytics. Suppose its click-through rate is 1%, then any conversation or module recommendation block that invites click-through rate higher than 1% would be considered as useful.

Any comments?

Thanks!

-Daniel

Comments

Amazon’s picture

Amazon commented

One of the problems is we don't have a way to know which links are new forum topics. So the block would have to be a custom block that has specific tracking available.

The new forum topics would be changing all the time.

Kieran

danithaca’s picture

danithaca commented

Two questions about Web Analytics:

1. Instead of getting a final report, can we get the underlying logging data? If that's the case, we can write some scripts/queries to analyze the data and get the results we want.

2. Is it possible to get the tracker's click-thru rate on the d.o. homepage using Web Analytics?

Thanks!!

danithaca’s picture

danithaca commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)