A key aspect of any web project should be the definition of success metrics and the development of methods to gather the data so as to measure progress towards those goals.

However, all too often, gathering analytics on site performance is an afterthought that is relegated to a last minute activation of the Google Analytics module.

The aim of this session is two-fold. On the one hand we want to motivate the need for deeper analytics and explore the tools available to us - ranging from the free but proprietary Google Analytics to the open-source Piwik (a great alternative that provides significant benefits for certain use-cases). On the other hand, we focus on how to effectively measure engagement on a Drupal site.

We do this through a little game called "Follow that Node!". The presentation will track a node as it appears in different contexts within a Drupal site. We look at:

- How to get analytics from individual node pages.
- How to get analytics across sections of nodes (all nodes tagged with a certain vocabulary term).
- How to get analytics on how many times nodes appear in lists (views) and when they are clicked and at what position.

With effective measuring of how a node behaves across our entire site we then move our focus to how to do A/B or multivariate testing with Drupal nodes using Panels.

The session will contain both practical tips and code recipes as well as cover higher-level issues. It is ideally suited for an intermediate Drupal developer that is comfortable with modules such as Views and Panels and can also follow some basic code examples.