Plugin: Google Analytics

Hi, Nicholas. Thanks for the plugin. Just wanted you to know that you could just use:

{if member_group != "1"}
{exp:google_analytics}
{/if}

You don’t need to check for both. Checking for the superadmin group is enough.

Thank you, Sue! I didn’t know member_group only was enough in conditionals.

Seems a bit overkill to me thisone. Why not just put the ga code in an embed or -even better- a global variable?

… or simply write the GA code in template(s)? All very good strategies, true 😊. However, no need to hunt down the GA code using the plugin. I simply wrote it for convenience, even though I might only be saving a step or two compared to other strategies 😉

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with automating this kind of thing into a plugin.

One thing that this code misses, though, is the ability to accurately track site search. EE doesn’t use GET for the search parameter, so if you want to use Google Analytics to track your site searches you need to make some slight changes to the tracking call on search result pages.

Here’s how to do it in a regular template - I’ll leave it to Nicolas to figure out how to incorporate this into his plugin:

<pre><code>try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-1”); pageTracker._initData(); terms = ‘{exp:search:keywords}’; searchterms = terms.toLowerCase().replace(/\s/g,’+’); pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/search?q=’ + searchterms); } catch(err) {}</code></pre>

Obviously you’d need to wrap this in an if-else to check for the presence of the search keywords; this code will record a pageview to “/search” with your search term as the ‘q’ parameter. You can configure Site Search under the Profile Settings for your GA account.

Thank you Matthew. That’s a good idea, I’ll try to add this to the plugin, along with some other small features I had in mind.

I have updated the plugin to v0.2 to include site search tracking, as well as mailto/file download/outbound link tracking.

Changes: * New: Added search query tracking. Turned on by default and automatically triggered if on search result page * New: Added the {exp:google_analytics:track} tag, to track mailto/file download/outbound links

The plugin will track site searches by default when on a search result page (i.e. those pages with crazy search ids as the last segment). For flexibility, you can control site search tracking with the following parameters:

search_tracking="off"

If set to “on” or if the parameter is absent, the plugin will track site search queries on search result pages, i.e. search result pages where the last segment is the EE search id. Set to anything else to turn off.

search_query_parameter="/search/results?query="

Sets the search query parameter, set in Google Analytics. If the parameter is absent and search tracking is on, default is “/search?q=”.

Also added a quick tag to track mailto/file download/outbound links. Simply add onclick=”{exp:google_analytics:track link="/file/download/to/track/file.zip"}” to your links. Parameter:

link="/downloads/file.zip"

The mailto/file/outbound link to track.

The plugin seems to work fine on my side (queries and file downloads are recorded in GA), but let me know how it goes.

useful thanks, using it on my site.

Hi guys,

Hope Nicolas will not mind but I’ve taken the liberty to convert the plugin so it works under ExpressionEngine 2.0. I have also added some new functionnalities.

Changelog :

Version 0.4
- Changed some parameters name to reflect Google Analytics documentation
- Added the ability to set domain name
- Added the ability to set allow hash
- Added the ability to set allow linker
- Added the ability to load the asynchronous tracking code
- Cleaned up the code

Version 0.3
- ExpressionEngine 2.0 compatibility
- Cleaned up the code

You’ll find it attached to this post. Enjoy !

PS : I did not add e-commerce tracking because I think it’s out of the scope of this plugin and also because it would probably require a module.

Merci Matthieu for porting the plugin. Great additions as well (wasn’t aware of some of those GA features!). Don’t mind if I put this up on the developer’s (me) site as well? Also don’t mind if I do a backport for EE 1.6.8?

Well that was just me playing with your plugin and learning EE plugins. I don’t mind if you follow up on this of course. It’s your plugin after all 😉