{"id":1768,"date":"2015-08-04T15:45:58","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T14:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/?p=1768"},"modified":"2015-08-04T15:48:50","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T14:48:50","slug":"wordpress-analytics-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wordpress-analytics-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress Analytics Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"data-scheme\"<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019m obsessed with numbers. They give me a feeling of control. Page views, trends, visitor count and more. Not measuring things, makes me sad. If we have a historical data, we can check if our changes worked. Are certain topics more popular? Which stories are more popular on Twitter compared to Facebook? Infinite amount of questions.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to build a better analytics engine for us. I\u2019ll explain my constraints, and how I\u2019d approach it. Primary plan is that someone can say – \u201cjust use X\u201d. If that fails, I can still build it.<\/p>\n

Problem definition<\/b><\/p>\n

We have multiple WordPress installations with overlapping authors. They create blog posts, that are shared to Facebook and Twitter. Each post can include multiple embeds, that they produce – Sound Cloud, YouTube and similar. For each blog, we can also lookup into Google Analytics API and get stats on sessions, page views and time on site.<\/p>\n

There are two primary limitations of these external data sources. Firstly, we\u2019re rate limited – so we can only query them about once a day – per post URL. Secondly, we mostly get aggregated data.<\/p>\n

We would query these external API\u2019s about once a day. The only limitation we have is that we get aggregate\/sum data from them. Facebook only gives us total number of likes, so we need to make subtract previous value. This way we get number of likes in that day.<\/p>\n

Potential<\/b><\/p>\n

Having all the information in one place, it would allow us a couple of things:<\/p>\n