I'm using the GTM data layer to populate data through the enhanced ecommerce interface of Analytics. The goal is to provide detailed cost data so I can build a dashboard that shows profitability for my business. It's working great on a transaction basis and I am uploading shipping costs, product costs, discounts, and a host of other transaction data. However, my business also has fixed overhead costs. I want to upload that to analytics once per day so I can see the true profitability on a day by day basis. This requires it to be a server-side request from my PHP server. I am unfamiliar with how to set a custom metric from the server side. Does anyone know how I can send this once-per-day data to analytics from the server side? Would I send it as a pageview event? The variable name would be "fixed overhead". I'm not really sure where to start. Thanks in advance!
Sending data server-side to Google Analytics is entirely possible (and admittedly it is pretty daunting if you've not done it before).
The two best resources to use are the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol documentation and the Google Analytics Hit Builder. Use the parameter guide to prep the custom metric data specifically.
Here is my actual snippet that I use for all of my PHP projects (first ~150 lines or so). I'm certain there are better ways to do it, but at the very least it might help you figure out some of the complexities.
It's a lot of info to soak in, but I hope that gets you headed in the right direction!
Related
Does anyone know of a piece of code that can run on a server that pipes the data from Apache logs into Google Analytics? I've got a bunch of websites that generate logs, but the users would likely object to injecting Google tracking codes into them. This might be a nice way to get the basics, what's being requested from where, and have it all sorted for me in with my other Google Analytics pages.
You can use the new measurement protocol (available for universal analytics account only) to implement a serverside solution.
Piping logs would probably not work very well (at least if you want to do a batch job - I don't think you can send a timestamp via the measurement protocol, so it would look as if all hits occured at the same time) but it shouldn't be necessary anyway, just create an url with the relevant parameters pointing to the google endpoint and sent it in the background via CURL (or similiar).
If you're in the European Union remember privacy guidelines still apply and you need to inform users and provide an opt-out link.
For non-Universal Analytics accounts, you can use php-ga - Server-Side Google Analytics Client -- it's essentially a server-side implementation of ga.js.
One caveat: If you want the location metrics to record something other than the location of your server, you'll need to log with a Google Analytics mobile tracking ID. Just replace the "UA" in the tracking ID with "MO", like "MO-12345678-1"
GA needs JavaScript, I think, so that various things like screen resolution can be grabbed. So even if this were possible, you'd be missing a good deal of info for some of your users, skewing your other percentages. Also, if your users are suspicious of Google, they probably would not want you to upload their IP addresses to GA.
With all that in mind, I wonder whether a self-hosted GA-like system would fit the bill? If so, try Piwik.
I need to log details in PHP of analytics and usage.
I'm looking at various possibilities:
- Google Analytics server-side
- segment.io
- Just adding a record to a DB with PHP
My concern is how much additional processing this will take on my server. Of course Google Analytics' JavaScript implementation won't use anything on my server, but my server-side method of course will.
I also notice that on https://segment.io/docs/integrations/google-analytics they mention that "Server-side Google Analytics is being deprecated due to difficulty of use" - what does this mean?
So basically, I want to implement some basic analytics storing (count number of hits to a URL + some other basic info) server-side - what's the best way to do this considering all things? I only use the PHP language.
It seems that adding a record to the DB every page view might be a little too much.
Segment.io can actually give you the flexibility of all three of these. Using the php library https://segment.io/libraries/php you can start sending events from your server. The library is designed to queue and batch to maximize server efficiency.
Once the events leave your server, they'll go to Segment.io's servers. Once there, we can route the data to Google Analytics.
Additionally, you could use the "Webhooks" integration on Segment.io to set your own server as a receiving endpoint for the data in real-time, so that you could host your own analytics DB separately from the rest of your infrastructure quite easily/cleanly.
https://segment.io/docs/integrations/webhooks
I am defining out specs for a live activity feed on my website. I have the backend of the data model done but the open area is the actual code development where my development team is lost on the best way to make the feeds work. Is this purely done by writing custom code or do we need to use existing frameworks to make the feeds work in real time? Some suggestions thrown to me were to use reverse AJAX for this. Some one mentioned having the client poll the server every x seconds but i dont like this because it is unwanted server traffic if there are no updates. I was also mentioned a push engine like light streamer to push from server to browser.
So in the end: What is the way to go? Is it code related, purely pushing SQL quires, using frameworks, using platforms, etc.
My platform is written in PHP codeignitor and DB is MySQL.
The activity stream will have lots of activities. There are 42 components on the social networking I am developing, each component has approx 30ish unique activities that can be streamed.
Check out http://www.stream-hub.com/
I have been using superfeedr.com with Rails and I can tell you it works really well. Here are a few facts about it:
Pros
Julien, the lead developer is very helpful when you encounter a problem.
Immediate push of new feed entries which support PubSubHubHub.
JSon response which is perfect for parsing whoever you'd like.
Retrieve API in case the update callback fails and you need to retrieve the latest entries for a given feed.
Cons
Documentation is not up to the standards I would like, so you'll likely end up searching the web to find obscure implementation details.
You can't control how often superfeedr fetches each feed, they user a secret algorithm to determine that.
The web interface allows you to manage your feeds but becomes difficult to use when you subscribe to a loot of them
Subscription verification mechanism works synchronous so you need to make sure the object URL is ready for the superfeedr callback to hit it (they do provide an async option which does not seem to work well).
Overall I would recommend superfeedr as a good solution for what you need.
I'm looking at feeding dojo charts with data from google analytics, within a Zend Framework app. Has anyone done this or have any overview as to how I would go about it? I see there is a dojox.data.GoogleSearchStore. Does it make sense to have a dojox.data.GoogleAnalyticsStore and is anyone working on something like this?
I did a project recently doing this exactly - presenting data from the Google Analytics API using Dojo Charts. I'm not sure if the approach I used was the best, but I can at least give you some pointers.
Daniel Hartmann has a proposal for a Zend_Gdata_Analytics component. It hasn't been approved yet however you can find his code on Github and it works perfectly. I used this to get all the data I needed from analytics.
The Google Analytics API itself is quite powerful but it takes a while to get your head round it. Try and understand the difference between dimensions and metrics from Google's docs. It helps if you think of the service as building queries that return a table of data (like SQL), rather than just one value. In this table, each metric you add to the query adds a column of data to the result, and dimensions are used to restrict and group the data overall. So for example:
$ga->newDataQuery()
->addDimension(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::DIMENSION_DATE)
->addMetric(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::METRIC_VISITS)
->addMetric(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::METRIC_VISITORS)
->addMetric(Zend_Gdata_Analytics_DataQuery::METRIC_PAGEVIEWS);
gives you the total visits, visitors and page views for each day.
Analytics sometimes takes a few seconds to respond to queries (especially complex ones) so you'll want to cache the data. In my case I was selecting it at regular intervals by cron and storing it in a database.
On the Dojo side, I don't think dojox.data.GoogleSearchStore will help you. I used a combination of dojo.data.ItemFileWriteStore, dojox.charting.DataSeries and Zend_Dojo_Data, but I don't think my requirements would be typical. I'd suggest starting with the basics - get your graphs working with sample (hardcoded) data before your try and drop in your analytics. There are some tutorials on sitepen.com which I found useful.
Good luck!
We have a client that wants a store locator on their website. I've been asked to find a webservice that will allow us to send a zipcode as a request and have it return locations within x radius. We found this, but it's maintained by a single person, and doesn't look like it gets updated or supported very well. We're looking for something commercial, ideally that updates their zipcode database at least once per quarter, and that has a well-documented API with PHP accessibility. I won't say price isn't an object, but right now we just want some ideas, and my google-fu has failed me.
I've already posted this over on the webmasters forum, but thought I'd cover my bases and post here too.
I've repurposed this outstanding script to conquor this same challenge. It's free, has been very reliable, and is relatively quick.
In my script, I have addresses stored in the DB. So rather than show a page to enter addresses, I simply pass them as a string and let the magic happen.
He says it in the app, but ensure that if you go this route you get your own Google Maps API. It won't work with his!
If you want to go a bit less technical approach, here's a MySQL query you could run on your locations (you'd have to add lat/long to your DB or setup a GEOCODING service) to give you distance as the crow flies.
Google Maps has a geocoder as well and it geocodes to the specific address.
It's limited to x number of requests but that shouldn't be a big deal if your site is small and if you cache. You can get more requests if you pay.
It can be accessed via javascript or via PHP (and there are several prewritten PHP modules out there)
Link here:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/services.html
(I worked for a company that did upwards of 800,000 requests a day, so it's stable and fast :) )
PostcodeAnywhere has a Store Locator feature - I think it's pay per use, but I've used their other products before and they're very cheap.
http://www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk/store-locator-tool/