CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analyticsgoogle-analytics-api
Gabor Peto
Gabor Peto

Reputation: 642

Google Analytics Simple visitors count

I am new to GA and I have the following scenario: I have a website that does not require the GA services at all except for one page. This page's URL something like this: http://example.com/events?eventId=1234

What I try to achieve is to count the visitors for the different events specified in the parameter. (So later I can retrieve this information and I can show how many people visited a particular event's site).

I have been looking at https://www.google.com/analytics for a while however I could not figure out how to make the GA distinguish by the parameters. So far I registered at GA and I have the unique code and I can include this to the page:

<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxxxx-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(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);
})();

Additionally this web application is implemented with Play framework

Upvotes: 0

Views: 5079

Answers (2)

CrayonViolent
CrayonViolent

Reputation: 32532

By default, the on-page GA code snippet will record the URL, minus protocol and domain. That means if you have

www.example.com/events?eventId=1234

vs.

www.example.com/events?eventId=4567

You will see 2 separate entries in your pages reports:

/events?eventId=1234
/events?eventId=4567

So out-of-the-box you should be good to go.

However...one issue you brought up in a comment:

does it work even if there are other parameters as well?

Yes it will, and that presents a problem. Because these 2 will also count as 2 separate entries:

www.example.com/events?eventId=123&a=b
www.example.com/events?eventId=123&a=c

In order to get around this, you will need to as tszming mentioned in his answer: track with a custom event (or custom variable), or else override the default page name with something of your choice. Or you can do both; each method is basically a different way of looking at the same basic data, and allows you to do slightly different things. But for answering your basic question of "how many people went to {eventId} version of the page, all of the options will answer that.

sidenote: in any case, all of these solutions involve getting a query string param. GA does not have a built in method for grabbing a query string parameter value, so you will have to grab that value yourself. Unfortunately, javascript does not have a built in way of doing it either. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to write a function that will do it for you (just google "javascript get query param").

Upvotes: 1

tszming
tszming

Reputation: 2084

You can use event tracking or just log a virtual pageview

e.g.

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/events/{id}']);

Replace the {id} with the actual id

Upvotes: 2

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