Disable analytics for iframe - google-analytics

The website uses embed Youtube videos, Slide Shares, Open Table Widgets that become iframes. According to the new law about GDPR we need to ask user's consent for tracking his activity. But how then I can use these components and at the same time disable analytics that comes automatically from these iframes?

It's very difficult to reconcile any kind of tracking with GDPR. If the frame you're loading does not provide privacy controls of its own, you would need to acquire the relevant consent before loading the iframe at all, which you can do via Javascript loaded from your own site.
As a workaround, you could proxy the services and strip tracking cookies and scripts before they ever reach the end user. I've done this before.
The privacy-friendly approach is to not use services that track users in the first place, and then you have nothing to worry about. Sadly this is easier said than done, since the vast majority of such services' entire business model relies on tracking people.

Related

Tracking iframe origin

I am creating a Web Widget, a page that customers can use within an HTML Iframe in order to embed our experience on 3rd parties and vendors.
The site will be public, I am not willing to ask consumers to register in order to have a key or a unique identity to be passed as a query param for example (e.g. ?id=<unique_id>).
On the other hand, I need to track who is using the iframe. What are my options? A colleague suggested using the request headers, such as the origin, to track the usage on the server-side. Is that a good strategy? I'm not sure how much I can trust the origin header.
What if I fire an event (hence a client to server call), at page load (such as analytics) which logs the current page URL? Would that work, from within an iframe?
I am pretty sure I am reinventing the wheel here. What would be some good recommendations?
Thanks!
For others ideating for a similar solution, my fix was actually to simply hook a proper client analytics to the page, and trigger a page load event, upon page load, which would push not just the page, but quite a few other properties to our analytics.
Also, we added a clientId query param to our urls, so that we could identify precisely who was serving the iframe visited by the user.

How does Google Analytics filters duplicate site entrances

We are implementing a native analytics system and want to apply the same tracking principles Google Analytics uses. We've figured everything out but one thing:
Every time I refresh a page with an url that has utm-parameters attached to it, Google Analytics somehow figures out that it's not actually a visit but the same page that gets refreshed and shows only one visit in its dashboard from that particular source.
Is anybody aware how GA specifically does that so I can replicate it in our system?
I know that I can use
performance.navigation.type
in my JS script, but it doesn't give me desired results.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Attribution in GA happens on the Google servers, so JavaScript will be of limited use. Basically since a reload means that the user has the same client id and no change in the channel (source, medium and campaign are the same as in the previous visit) the existing session will be continued (a change of campaign/source information would trigger a new Google Analytics session).
Google has a very nice chart that explains how campaign information and traffic source information is processed.

Using Google Analytics to Track 'offline' Media?

I'm currently working on a project where we've created a single-page website that contains a number of resources and information (including e-mails and external links to departmental sites, etc) - the site (page) will live on a USB which we will hand out to our customers over the summer.
Naturally, it'd be great to see if this campaign is successful by tracking whether or not folks are opening/using the USB site. My first thought was to alter all the out-going links to track folks via the Campaigns in Google Analytics; but since we do not own or have access to all of the various departments, this isn't an ideal solution.
My next thought was to add click events and track things that way - this would give us a nice snapshot of what folks viewing the USB were doing on it (provided they were connected to the internet at the time - we're not tremendously concerned with the accuracy of the stats, just a jist of usage). But since the site lives on a physical drive...and you can't set up a tracking account in GA without an address it seems this won't work.
My question is...is there a way around this? It almost seems like app tracking is a mix of what we need, but without being an actual app. Anyone have any advice?
Worse case scenario we just go with option 1 - best case scenario someone out there is more brilliant than I.

Is Google Analytics Secure to Track Business Application Usage?

I have recently been required to implement some Usage Tracking to a web-based Business Application. Basically what needs to be tracked is what pages in the application are being used and for how long users stay on those pages. The application is hosted on the internet and is HTML/JavaScript.
I could use Google Analytics to track page views, visits and browser capabilities, but is it secure enough to use for business applications?
Does anyone else use Google Analytics to track web-based business application usage? Or do you have some thoughts on this?
Also, I couldn't find anything from Google specifically stating whether this is a good or bad thing to do.
It depends what you want to be secure.
Gathered data, if you trust Google, is pretty secure.
However, Analytics data can be tampered with. Someone can read your Analytics ID from page source (or HTTP traffic) and submit fake pageviews, events, change custom variables, etc.

Google Chat in ASP.NET application

I want to provide chat facility to my website visitors. This should be same as google chat (person to person communication). Are there any free tools available to integrate in the website? Or is there any way that we can use Google Chat's API and can integrate in our website?
Pls help me.
You can embed google chat into your web page, instructions here
I think a reasonable approach would involve opening an iframe that talks to a dynamic page. The dynamic page would be auto-refreshed by two or more clients and continously post to/read from a table that stores the ID of the session, timestamp, user name(or IP), and message for the chats. The ID of the session would correspond to the dynamic page ID and bob's your uncle.
I'm sure there are various implementations floating around, but I'd want to control this on my own. No user accounts required if you set it up correctly, thought finding other users may be an issue without accounts.
There are a lot of good embeddable chat widgets you can insert into a page fairly easily that do all the work for you.
I've tried out a few of the ones listed in the link above (mostly MeeboMe and Geesee) and don't have any major complaints. With that many choices you should be able to find one that meets your needs. Most don't even require a login.

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