How to design analytics solution (Django stack)

Question

I need to add analytics feature to our web service so we can provide our customers a way to understand their own content. I was wondering if anybody can provide some pointers, guidelines on designing such solutions. I know this is a little too open-end. Here is a list of concrete questions, and I have a vague idea on some of them but I would like to see more references or best practices:

1. How to organize the database for analytics data so it won't hurt site performance and scalability?
2. How to implement the tracking code? JavaScript?
3. We allow people to embed the content in other web sites, using iframe. How do we track web analytics for that? For example, how to we track the traffic source?
4. How do we track the "mentioning" on social media? Like, somebody blogged about a piece of content, or twittered/facebook'ed the content.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Are you absolutely sure you want to build your own analytics rather than use Google Analytics?

If you want to mash up the data to add value for your clients, you can use the Analytics Data Export API -- that way, your time is spent on that end of the deal, rather than reinventing the analytics wheel