AnalyticsGoo

AnalyticsGoo is a gem (or plugin) that provides server side non-javascript tracking using google analytics. The original version tried to mock-up the tracking for use with the UA-* web property ids. The problem with going that route was that all tracking occurs under a single IP address. I have made changes so that it now support google's new MO-* mobile site tracking that allows you to pass the remote IP address via a parameter. The initial intent was to make this look like a logger object. With a single instance that can be used throughout the system; however that is no longer what is needed for our system. We actually need a new version for each request, so the code is still changing.

Install

gem install eyestreet-analytics_goo

Newer usage pattern

Initially I made an adapter pattern thinking that we would support multiple analytics packages. So far I only need Google Analytics:

  tracker =  AnalyticsGoo::GoogleAnalyticsAdapter.new(:analytics_id => "MO-11685745-3",
                                                  :domain => "shor.tswit.ch",
                                                  :remote_address => "75.103.6.17",
                                                  :user_agent => "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6",
                                                  :http_accept_language => "en-us,en;q=0.5")
  tracker.track_page_view("/testFoo/myPage.html")

Example

The simple usage is the following:

    tracker = AnalyticsGoo.config(:google_analytics, 
                                  :analytics_id => "MO-11685745-3", 
                                  :domain => "demo.eyestreet.com")

    tracker.track_page_view("/foo")

The first parameter passed to the config initializes the desired analytics adapter. Currently we only support Google Analytics. The subsequent hash provide a name for the account, the analytics id, and a domain.

Rails Usage

In your environment.rb add the following:

config.gem "analytics_goo", :lib => "analytics_goo"

You can call things in the same way as above, or you can mix in some additional rails specific functionality that is shown below. In an intializer like config/initializers/analytics_goo.rb or in your appropriate environment.rb file

    AnalyticsGoo.config(:google_analytics, :analytics_id => "MO-11685745-3", 
                                           :domain => "demo.eyestreet.com", 
                                           :rails_core_mixins => true, 
                                           :environment => "production")

analytics type - Currently we only support :google_analytics

The analytics option hash takes the following:

:analytics_id
:domain
:rails_core_mixins - Defaults to false. If set to true then you get an accessor method on rails core classes for analytics_goo
:environment - The RAILS_ENV environment that the analytics code should be called in. In all other environments it is a noop.

Then in your models, controllers, and mailers you can do the following:

user = User.find(:first)
user.analytics_goo.track_page_view("/found_my_first_user")

Testing

Check test/test_helper.rb to make sure you have the required gems installed.

rake test or autotest

Credits

AnalyticsGoo is maintained by Rob Christie and is funded by EyeStreet Software.