Open-Source Project Analytics: What to Track

Open-source project maintainers often skip analytics entirely. GitHub stars, npm download counts, and GitHub traffic stats are usually enough, right?

Not quite. Your documentation site and landing page tell a different story — one GitHub doesn't capture.

Why track an open-source site

Your project docs site and landing page are where potential users first understand what your project does and whether to try it. Analytics on these pages answers questions GitHub can't:

Which docs pages get the most traffic? (What are people actually trying to do?)
Where are users coming from? (Are you getting organic search traffic? Who's linking to you?)
Are users navigating from the landing page to the docs? Or bouncing immediately?
Which tutorial pages are highest-traffic? (Which integrations or use cases are popular?)

This is signal for prioritising docs improvements. If your /docs/react-integration page gets 10x more traffic than any other page, that's worth knowing.

What to measure

Top pages — knowing which docs pages get the most traffic helps you prioritise maintenance and improvements. A page that's high-traffic and outdated is more urgent than a rarely-visited page that's out of date.

Top referrers — where is your documentation traffic coming from? Other projects linking to your docs? Stack Overflow answers? Direct search? Each referrer has different intent.

Landing page visits vs docs visits — if your landing page gets 10,000 visits/month but your docs get 200, visitors are not converting to users. If docs get similar traffic to the landing page, you're serving an existing user base.

Goal: getting-started page visit — not a traditional conversion, but you can set up a goal for /docs/quick-start or /docs/getting-started visits as a proxy for "user attempted to try the project."

Privacy considerations for open-source projects

Your users are often developers who care about privacy. Running Google Analytics on a developer tool's documentation site is noticed. There's a reason many developer tools have moved away from it.

Privacy-first analytics — no cookies, no personal data, no third-party scripts — is a natural fit for open-source project sites. You can also communicate this openly: "analytics by Antlytics, cookieless and privacy-first" is a feature, not a disclaimer.

Free-tier suitability

Most open-source project documentation sites have moderate traffic. The Antlytics free tier (limited to the Hobby plan) or the Starter plan (A$10/month) fits the vast majority of OSS docs sites. You're unlikely to exceed 500,000 pageviews/month unless your project becomes very widely adopted.

For projects with significant traffic, the Starter plan includes unlimited sites — useful if you run analytics on both your landing page and docs subdomain.

What you cannot track without analytics

Without analytics on your docs site, you lose:

Knowing which pages are broken or confusing (high bounce rate on a docs page suggests something is wrong)
Understanding where users drop off in your getting-started flow
Identifying which frameworks/integrations your users care about most
Detecting when an incoming link from another project or article drives a traffic spike

GitHub's built-in traffic insights cover your repository page, not external docs sites. npm download counts reflect installs, not comprehension.

Sharing analytics publicly

Some open-source maintainers share their analytics openly as a signal of project health. A steady upward trend in docs traffic is a positive indicator for potential users and contributors.

If you want to share your analytics in your README or on your project page, see building in public with analytics for how to do this without sharing data you don't intend to share.

FAQ

Should I track my docs site separately from my landing page? Yes. Separate sites in Antlytics let you see traffic patterns independently. Docs traffic and landing page traffic have different sources and different meanings.

What about tracking GitHub Pages or Netlify-hosted docs? Both support custom HTML in the <head>. Add the Antlytics tracking snippet to your docs site's HTML template (or layout file if you're using a static site generator like Docusaurus or MkDocs).

Does analytics work on statically generated docs sites? Yes. The tracking snippet is client-side JavaScript. It runs in the visitor's browser regardless of whether your site is statically generated or server-rendered.

My docs site is on a subdomain (docs.myproject.io) — can I track it under the same Antlytics account? Yes. Antlytics supports unlimited sites on the Starter plan. Add docs.myproject.io as a separate site with its own tracking ID, or consider whether you want combined or separate reporting.