Visitor analytics for public notebook

Community Help
1

I have a public notebook. I am certain that in the past there was a section where I could see the number of visitors of my notebook per day in a graph. I can’t find it any more. Has the feature been restricted to paying accounts, or moved?

Thank you.

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2

I’m not 100% positive about this but I don’t think that any features have been moved from free accounts to pro accounts since the inception of pro.

That particular feature was called “insights” and it was removed site-wide, according to the release notes of Dec 11. There was some discussion about this on Slack and I think the feeling was that the user interface was becoming too cluttered. I guess some internal data indicated that the feature was not very widely used, so it was removed.

I personally never really used the insights button, as it seemed to give very limited information. If you’re really interested in that functionality, you might hook up an analytics tool:

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3

Yeah that was me, you can blame me! I removed that as part of a general effort to cut features that are unsatisfying or underused as-is. Our sidebar panes were proliferating and I made the call to cut that one because:

  • It generally wasn’t relevant for private notebooks
  • You couldn’t see ranking/summary across all notebooks, had to hunt and peck for what was getting traffic
  • You couldn’t distinguish own views from others’ views

But several people have written in that they miss it, and the idea of viewer analytics in general remains important and powerful. I’d love to hear about what you wanted from it and how you used it. Were you interested in overall public views, or certain people (e.g. clients) viewing, or…?

(We’re still tracking the data on the backend, fwiw.)

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4

Hello @tophtucker ,

thank you for the response. I really like Observable too.

The way I used it was to get a feeling of whether the public notebook I created is being discovered and used by people.

I won’t bother adding google analytics to it, I don’t want to spend the time to do it, and I’d also rather avoid feeding Google with additional data of the people that want to use my notebook.

So yes, returning the analytics would be welcome. But no hard feelings if you don’t, I am not a paying user after all.

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5

If you were to implement only one notebook stat, I think the interesting metric is how many people other than the notebook author have visited a notebook. I can’t imagine a use case where the total views (including the author) would be very useful.

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