6 ms·

Google Analytics for developers

95 points by yashke 14y ago

wiremine 14y ago
You can also do this on the server side. Here is a Python implementation: https://github.com/kra3/py-ga-mob https://github.com/kra3/py-ga-mob
- thomasbachem 14y ago
  This is the Python port of my http://code.google.com/p/php-ga/ http://code.google.com/p/php-ga/ project :)
dangrossman 14y ago
I was expecting something different with the "for developers" title. Perhaps replicating some of the features of MixPanel or KissMetrics, which can track all kinds of interesting things for developers -- which features users of your app use most, in which order they use those features, whether this week's signups are more engaged than last week's signups, etc.
- yashke 14y ago
  That's the next topic I want to digg in playing with Google Analytics. When I have some results I'll post them.
  - iamchrisle 14y ago
    This is awesome. Thanks!!
- iamchrisle 14y ago
  I actually use event tracking a lot to track exactly that. For our clients, we not only know which features they're using most but by tracking validation errors in Google Analytics we also know what parts of the app is giving users trouble. Best part is, with Google Analytics you can see what people did before and after they ran into trouble and correct for the user experience.
  - swalberg 14y ago
    This. We recently started doing this and the data it's provided has been awesome.
bluetidepro 14y ago
> "You probably use most of basic features of Google Analytics - you know how to get information how many visits was made each day, you know your users browser segmentation etc. But how can you measure effects of your blog post?" That hits the nail on the head. Great article, although I wish you went into it a bit more in depth on how to do those actions, how to do other actions, and then maybe talk more about the benefits. I love browsing Google Analytics but I will be the first to tell you that I don't really understand much from it, other than than the obvious things. I really wish I could figure out how to integrate it better with my web sites, like you quickly demoed. Again, I really suggest doing this same article with a bit more information. It would really help out those who are your target audience for this article. Thanks! :)
- yashke 14y ago
  Thanks, as I mentioned in other comment - I plan to digg deeper and share knowledge, so be patient :)
  - bluetidepro 14y ago
    Oh, I must have missed that in the comments. I really appreciate that! Keep me posted, would love to see that article! Thanks! :)
kevinconroy 14y ago
Here are two of my favorite tricks. You can do this just after you set your account ID:  <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'YOUR ANALYTICS ID GOES HERE']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); //******************* // Trick #1: Track page load time in Google Analytics // (note: only works for HTML5 browsers) //******************* _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); //******************* // Trick #2: Add a Javascript error handler so that it creates an event in Google Analytics // whenever there's a CLIENT-SIDE javascript error //******************* window.onerror = function(message, file, line) { var sFormattedMessage = '[' + file + ' (' + line + ')] ' + message; _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Errors', 'Browser', sFormattedMessage, null, true]); } </script> Update: Included complete GA code to address any confusion on order and values available in stack.
- bluetidepro 14y ago
  > "// Track page load time in Google Analytics" After adding that, where does that appear in the Google Analytics dashboard? Can you explain further how that works? Thanks!
  - kevinconroy 14y ago
    It's under Standard Reporting -> Content -> Site Speed The GA code will track client side page load time (DOM fully loaded) across your site. You'll get site-wide averages and you'll also get to drill in on slow pages. This doesn't work for every single browser (last I checked it only worked for browsers that support HTML5), but it still provides a good sample size. It's also important to do this as Google Webmaster tools dropped support of the Site Speed lab which shows you how fast Google thinks your site is ( <1.5 seconds user DOM load is considered faster, >= 1.5 seconds is "slow"). If you're trying to improve your Google ranking you need to be tracking how fast Google thinks your site is. (Also, fast websites are great for lots of reasons, not just Google ranking.) See also: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/05/measure-page-load-time-with-site-speed.html http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/05/measure-page-load-time...
dbarlett 14y ago
I'm a big fan of the GAS (Google Analytics on Steroids) wrapper [1]. One of the coolest features is firing GA events from embedded YouTube videos [2] to track viewer retention [3]. [1] https://github.com/cardinalpath/gas https://github.com/cardinalpath/gas [2] https://gist.github.com/2715896 https://gist.github.com/2715896 [3] http://i.imgur.com/QILnG.png http://i.imgur.com/QILnG.png
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
instakill 14y ago
Perhaps I'm confused but what benefit do you get from using event tracking for an outbound click, and lastly what does ET have to do with real time? Thanks
- polyfractal 14y ago
  I use event tracking on my outbound clicks all the time. My side project is a vertical niche search engine, so I like to know when, where and how people are leaving the site (since that is the point of the app afterall). I have some of it tracked with internal code, but for a lot of things that don't need rigorous analysis/tracking, firing an outbound click event to GA is sufficient.
- ry0ohki 14y ago
  If gives you more context around an exit to your site, ie someone didn't just hit back or close their browser, they left your site via a means you provided, and this is where they went
iamchrisle 14y ago
If you want to track if people are reading your blog, you can use the onscroll javascript event that fires events into Google Analytics. (eg: http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/21/advanced-content-tracking-with-google-analytics-part-1/ http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/21/advanced-content-tracking...) By looking at time to scroll, time to the end of the blog post, and comparing that to the number of unique page views per visit, you can tell if your content is engaging.
euroclydon 14y ago
How can you see individual user sessions using Google Analytics? In other words, how can I see, for an individual visitor, their landing page, sequence of subsequent page views, and finally their exit page?
- iamchrisle 14y ago
  Generally you should be paying attention to trends, not individual users. Either way: Landing pages: Go to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages What you probably want is to create an advanced segment: Landing page = something. You can use regex or an exact match term. Then go to audience > visitor flow, select the advanced segment you used and you can visually see how users navigated your site. Remember: Keep in mind that a user can technically visit your site using browser tabs. That would give you a report where people went from page A to page B even if there isn't a link on page A going to page B. Hence: Use GA to gain insight into trends.
stephth 14y ago
Is anyone using GA to track mobile apps? The mobile SDKs shows a lot of potential until you start wondering about offline usage, GA being a website tracker first. I couldn't find any final answers but from what I can see it might be a sore point: the SDK docs dodge the topic [1] and I see complaints, ie events can be batched for later but get the timestamps of when they were uploaded, instead of when they happened [2,3,4]. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/v2/%20offline https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://developers.goog... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618719/how-does-google-analytics-for-android-handle-offline-app-usage http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618719/how-does-google-a... [3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4484748/what-happens-with-iphone-google-analytics-calls-when-theres-no-internet-connect http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4484748/what-happens-with... [4] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/analytics/132Eet7kVFE/rM_kp4j8uIEJ http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/analytics/132Eet...
- campnic 14y ago
  We are using GA to track mobile apps. The local queuing and dispatch of hits to GA is covered here[1]. We've found it to be pretty reliable. You can also modify the dispatch time for testing, etc. [1]https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/android/v2/dispatch https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
  - stephth 14y ago
    Note: Data must be dispatched and received by 4 a.m. of the following day, in the local timezone of each profile. Any data received later than that will not appear in reports. Do your mobile apps require an Internet connection? From what I'm seeing I imagine that's a prerequisite to use GA. It's a deal breaker for me though, I can't intentionally throw away a slice of offline usage data (iPods, iPads, etc).
xyzzyb 14y ago
Those are some good basics. Tracking user actions can be very useful: I use it on movieterminals.com to see everything that gets typed into each console. The theory being that (one day?) I'll use that to enhance the scripts to work how people expect. Tracking an event per page 404 or 500 can also be very helpful. If you aren't already using something more robust to track errors you could even setup alerts to watch for those events and contact you. Goals are good, although funnels are even better. Finally: if you can afford it I've found that Clicky offers many great advantages over google analytics. More helpful default reports, a better realtime view, etc.
campnic 14y ago
At the risk of going off topic, a question about sampling and sampling rates. If I set sampling to 1%, will the visitor totals in the Google Analytics dashboards reflect 1% of my true values or do they compensate/extrapolate out to 100% based on the sampling rate?
- iamchrisle 14y ago
  No. There are two things here. Sampling rate for calculating page timing and using sampled data when generating reports. Confusingly, they are two different things with the same word "sample." Sampling rate only affects calculating page timing because it's client side and slows down the client. (http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1205784 http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...) Google Analytics will collect all the unfiltered data for the web property. (http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2637192 http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...) However, to speed up ad-hoc querying, like when you create a custom report, it will limit the amount of data it will fetch to generate that report in order to make the user interface faster. You can increase/decrease that using the slider. YOu will only see the slider after something like 250k unique pageviews. Google Analytics Premium increases the number. If you really want to get a better sense of page timing, you should look both at the client side timing and the server side timing together. All you can really control is stuff going out. You can't help it if the user is running a netbook with 512 megs of RAM :)
dudus 14y ago
If you want to extract more data from your site to Google Analytics I recommend GAS (Google Analytics on Steroids). https://github.com/CardinalPath/gas https://github.com/CardinalPath/gas It adds these events and even more to your site. (I'm the main developer by the way.)
- ApolloRising 14y ago
  This is really impressive.
jgalt212 14y ago
The article is interesting, but gives some bad instructions on how to track outbound links and also probably how to track form submissions. Because of the asynchronous nature of communications back/forth from Google Analytics if you load a new page before an event is properly tracked, you won't be able to see it on the GA Dashboard. Bad intel is worse than no intel at all. Here's what Google itself has to say on the matter: http://support.Google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1136920 http://support.Google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Here's how to correct one code example from the blog post: //this function is OK, but probably an unnecessary abstraction of a one-liner function trackEvent(category, action, label) { window._gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, action, label]) } //this event handler will not track some non-negligible percentage of events $("article a").click(function(e) { var element = $(this) var label = element.attr("href") trackEvent("Outbound link", "Click", label) }); //corrected outbound link event handler which gives GA 100 ms to register //the event. higher than 100 risks UX degradation, lower increases the % //of untracked events. 100 ms is happy medium $("article a").click(function(e) { e.preventDefault(); //stay on the page for now var element = $(this) var label = element.attr("href") trackEvent("Outbound link", "Click", label) //leave the page after a short delay window.setTimeout("window.location.href='" + label + "'", 100); });
- simonw 14y ago
  I'm a bit suspicous of that method... will it still work for people right clicking and opening in new window, or shift-clicking, or middle-clicking, or right clicking and copying the URL?

95 points by yashke 14y ago

You can also do this on the server side. Here is a Python implementation: https://github.com/kra3/py-ga-mob https://github.com/kra3/py-ga-mob

thomasbachem 14y ago
This is the Python port of my http://code.google.com/p/php-ga/ http://code.google.com/p/php-ga/ project :)

dangrossman 14y ago

I was expecting something different with the "for developers" title. Perhaps replicating some of the features of MixPanel or KissMetrics, which can track all kinds of interesting things for developers -- which features users of your app use most, in which order they use those features, whether this week's signups are more engaged than last week's signups, etc.

yashke 14y ago
That's the next topic I want to digg in playing with Google Analytics. When I have some results I'll post them.
- iamchrisle 14y ago
  This is awesome. Thanks!!
iamchrisle 14y ago
I actually use event tracking a lot to track exactly that. For our clients, we not only know which features they're using most but by tracking validation errors in Google Analytics we also know what parts of the app is giving users trouble. Best part is, with Google Analytics you can see what people did before and after they ran into trouble and correct for the user experience.
- swalberg 14y ago
  This. We recently started doing this and the data it's provided has been awesome.

bluetidepro 14y ago

> "You probably use most of basic features of Google Analytics - you know how to get information how many visits was made each day, you know your users browser segmentation etc. But how can you measure effects of your blog post?" That hits the nail on the head. Great article, although I wish you went into it a bit more in depth on how to do those actions, how to do other actions, and then maybe talk more about the benefits. I love browsing Google Analytics but I will be the first to tell you that I don't really understand much from it, other than than the obvious things. I really wish I could figure out how to integrate it better with my web sites, like you quickly demoed. Again, I really suggest doing this same article with a bit more information. It would really help out those who are your target audience for this article. Thanks! :)

yashke 14y ago
Thanks, as I mentioned in other comment - I plan to digg deeper and share knowledge, so be patient :)
- bluetidepro 14y ago
  Oh, I must have missed that in the comments. I really appreciate that! Keep me posted, would love to see that article! Thanks! :)

kevinconroy 14y ago

Here are two of my favorite tricks. You can do this just after you set your account ID:  <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'YOUR ANALYTICS ID GOES HERE']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); //******************* // Trick #1: Track page load time in Google Analytics // (note: only works for HTML5 browsers) //******************* _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); //******************* // Trick #2: Add a Javascript error handler so that it creates an event in Google Analytics // whenever there's a CLIENT-SIDE javascript error //******************* window.onerror = function(message, file, line) { var sFormattedMessage = '[' + file + ' (' + line + ')] ' + message; _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Errors', 'Browser', sFormattedMessage, null, true]); } </script> Update: Included complete GA code to address any confusion on order and values available in stack.

bluetidepro 14y ago
> "// Track page load time in Google Analytics" After adding that, where does that appear in the Google Analytics dashboard? Can you explain further how that works? Thanks!
- kevinconroy 14y ago
  It's under Standard Reporting -> Content -> Site Speed The GA code will track client side page load time (DOM fully loaded) across your site. You'll get site-wide averages and you'll also get to drill in on slow pages. This doesn't work for every single browser (last I checked it only worked for browsers that support HTML5), but it still provides a good sample size. It's also important to do this as Google Webmaster tools dropped support of the Site Speed lab which shows you how fast Google thinks your site is ( <1.5 seconds user DOM load is considered faster, >= 1.5 seconds is "slow"). If you're trying to improve your Google ranking you need to be tracking how fast Google thinks your site is. (Also, fast websites are great for lots of reasons, not just Google ranking.) See also: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/05/measure-page-load-time-with-site-speed.html http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/05/measure-page-load-time...

dbarlett 14y ago

I'm a big fan of the GAS (Google Analytics on Steroids) wrapper [1]. One of the coolest features is firing GA events from embedded YouTube videos [2] to track viewer retention [3]. [1] https://github.com/cardinalpath/gas https://github.com/cardinalpath/gas [2] https://gist.github.com/2715896 https://gist.github.com/2715896 [3] http://i.imgur.com/QILnG.png http://i.imgur.com/QILnG.png

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

instakill 14y ago

Perhaps I'm confused but what benefit do you get from using event tracking for an outbound click, and lastly what does ET have to do with real time? Thanks

polyfractal 14y ago
I use event tracking on my outbound clicks all the time. My side project is a vertical niche search engine, so I like to know when, where and how people are leaving the site (since that is the point of the app afterall). I have some of it tracked with internal code, but for a lot of things that don't need rigorous analysis/tracking, firing an outbound click event to GA is sufficient.
ry0ohki 14y ago
If gives you more context around an exit to your site, ie someone didn't just hit back or close their browser, they left your site via a means you provided, and this is where they went

iamchrisle 14y ago

If you want to track if people are reading your blog, you can use the onscroll javascript event that fires events into Google Analytics. (eg: http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/21/advanced-content-tracking-with-google-analytics-part-1/ http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/21/advanced-content-tracking...) By looking at time to scroll, time to the end of the blog post, and comparing that to the number of unique page views per visit, you can tell if your content is engaging.

euroclydon 14y ago

How can you see individual user sessions using Google Analytics? In other words, how can I see, for an individual visitor, their landing page, sequence of subsequent page views, and finally their exit page?

iamchrisle 14y ago
Generally you should be paying attention to trends, not individual users. Either way: Landing pages: Go to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages What you probably want is to create an advanced segment: Landing page = something. You can use regex or an exact match term. Then go to audience > visitor flow, select the advanced segment you used and you can visually see how users navigated your site. Remember: Keep in mind that a user can technically visit your site using browser tabs. That would give you a report where people went from page A to page B even if there isn't a link on page A going to page B. Hence: Use GA to gain insight into trends.

stephth 14y ago

Is anyone using GA to track mobile apps? The mobile SDKs shows a lot of potential until you start wondering about offline usage, GA being a website tracker first. I couldn't find any final answers but from what I can see it might be a sore point: the SDK docs dodge the topic [1] and I see complaints, ie events can be batched for later but get the timestamps of when they were uploaded, instead of when they happened [2,3,4]. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ios/v2/%20offline https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://developers.goog... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618719/how-does-google-analytics-for-android-handle-offline-app-usage http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618719/how-does-google-a... [3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4484748/what-happens-with-iphone-google-analytics-calls-when-theres-no-internet-connect http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4484748/what-happens-with... [4] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/analytics/132Eet7kVFE/rM_kp4j8uIEJ http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/analytics/132Eet...

campnic 14y ago
We are using GA to track mobile apps. The local queuing and dispatch of hits to GA is covered here[1]. We've found it to be pretty reliable. You can also modify the dispatch time for testing, etc. [1]https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/android/v2/dispatch https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
- stephth 14y ago
  Note: Data must be dispatched and received by 4 a.m. of the following day, in the local timezone of each profile. Any data received later than that will not appear in reports. Do your mobile apps require an Internet connection? From what I'm seeing I imagine that's a prerequisite to use GA. It's a deal breaker for me though, I can't intentionally throw away a slice of offline usage data (iPods, iPads, etc).

xyzzyb 14y ago

Those are some good basics. Tracking user actions can be very useful: I use it on movieterminals.com to see everything that gets typed into each console. The theory being that (one day?) I'll use that to enhance the scripts to work how people expect. Tracking an event per page 404 or 500 can also be very helpful. If you aren't already using something more robust to track errors you could even setup alerts to watch for those events and contact you. Goals are good, although funnels are even better. Finally: if you can afford it I've found that Clicky offers many great advantages over google analytics. More helpful default reports, a better realtime view, etc.

campnic 14y ago

At the risk of going off topic, a question about sampling and sampling rates. If I set sampling to 1%, will the visitor totals in the Google Analytics dashboards reflect 1% of my true values or do they compensate/extrapolate out to 100% based on the sampling rate?

iamchrisle 14y ago
No. There are two things here. Sampling rate for calculating page timing and using sampled data when generating reports. Confusingly, they are two different things with the same word "sample." Sampling rate only affects calculating page timing because it's client side and slows down the client. (http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1205784 http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...) Google Analytics will collect all the unfiltered data for the web property. (http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2637192 http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...) However, to speed up ad-hoc querying, like when you create a custom report, it will limit the amount of data it will fetch to generate that report in order to make the user interface faster. You can increase/decrease that using the slider. YOu will only see the slider after something like 250k unique pageviews. Google Analytics Premium increases the number. If you really want to get a better sense of page timing, you should look both at the client side timing and the server side timing together. All you can really control is stuff going out. You can't help it if the user is running a netbook with 512 megs of RAM :)

dudus 14y ago

If you want to extract more data from your site to Google Analytics I recommend GAS (Google Analytics on Steroids). https://github.com/CardinalPath/gas https://github.com/CardinalPath/gas It adds these events and even more to your site. (I'm the main developer by the way.)

ApolloRising 14y ago
This is really impressive.

jgalt212 14y ago

The article is interesting, but gives some bad instructions on how to track outbound links and also probably how to track form submissions. Because of the asynchronous nature of communications back/forth from Google Analytics if you load a new page before an event is properly tracked, you won't be able to see it on the GA Dashboard. Bad intel is worse than no intel at all. Here's what Google itself has to say on the matter: http://support.Google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1136920 http://support.Google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... Here's how to correct one code example from the blog post: //this function is OK, but probably an unnecessary abstraction of a one-liner function trackEvent(category, action, label) { window._gaq.push(['_trackEvent', category, action, label]) } //this event handler will not track some non-negligible percentage of events $("article a").click(function(e) { var element = $(this) var label = element.attr("href") trackEvent("Outbound link", "Click", label) }); //corrected outbound link event handler which gives GA 100 ms to register //the event. higher than 100 risks UX degradation, lower increases the % //of untracked events. 100 ms is happy medium $("article a").click(function(e) { e.preventDefault(); //stay on the page for now var element = $(this) var label = element.attr("href") trackEvent("Outbound link", "Click", label) //leave the page after a short delay window.setTimeout("window.location.href='" + label + "'", 100); });

simonw 14y ago
I'm a bit suspicous of that method... will it still work for people right clicking and opening in new window, or shift-clicking, or middle-clicking, or right clicking and copying the URL?