Tracking Google Analytics events with Symfony

I just finished implementing a first whack at tracking events with Google Analytics. For this experiment I picked the “elsewhere links” in the footer. Now when you click one these, you will trigger an event which will be tracked by Google Analytics. The idea is that I can then easily see which one is more popular, how their popularity changes over time, how nationality affects popularity, etc.

Of course I only have a handful of visitors per day and so the experiement is more a proof of concept than anything else. That said, now is a great time to pick one or more links and come find me on other places of the Internet!

Google Analytics in Symfony

I built this site using Symfony. Why and how is a story better left for another blog post. What is interesting here is how I implemented Google Analytics.

Obviously I’m using a plugin for this. And when it comes to plugins you are bound to some day come across one made by Kris Wallsmith. I did so with sfGoogleAnalyticsPlugin. It gives you a lot of control over the generated javascript and I learned about some new ways of using Google Analytics, like disabling data collection for example.

To do event tracking, however, you will need to implement the asynchronous javascript and that is something the plugin was missing. So I dug in and added a new asynchronous tracker class based on Kris’ work. It is still experimental and if you find anything to improve, please do.

Using the plugin was simple. First you enable it in your ProjectConfiguration.class.php:

class ProjectConfiguration extends sfProjectConfiguration
{
  public function setup()
  {
    $this->enablePlugins('sfGoogleAnalyticsPlugin');
  }
}

Then you add it to your filters.yml:

sf_google_analytics_plugin:
  class: sfGoogleAnalyticsFilter

And finally you configure it in your app.yml:

sf_google_analytics_plugin:
  enabled:       on
  profile_id:    UA-XXXXXXXX-X
  tracker:       asynchronous
  insertion:     top
  params:
    domain_name:   false
    linker_policy: true

Javascripting Google Analytics

For the business logic I decided to base it on jQuery. As a result the code is quite slim:

$(function() {
  $('#block-about a').each(function() {
    var _gaq = _gaq || [];
    $(this)
      .bind('click', function() {
        _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Elsewhere', this.rel]);
      })
      .attr('target', '_blank');
  });
});

It iterates all my “elsewhere links” and binds a function to the ‘click’ event. When it triggers, the function calls the Google Analytics code to track the event. Simple as that!

As a precaution I also added the target attribute, with “_blank” as value, so that the XHR request wont be interrupted.

Conclusion

One thing I would like to clean up is the hard coded GA object name in my javascript. sfGoogleAnalyticsPlugin uses a variable name, for some reason, and so ‘_gaq’ is not set in stone. Perhaps base it off of a value set in the app.yml configuration? It depends on what the reason is for the variable naming I guess.

I have yet to test to see if this actually work (crash early, crash cheap, right?) but if it does then I will want to post a follow-up here.