Polymer - Track app usage with Google Analytics - google-analytics

Question

I'm trying to use Google Analytics (web) with my polymer app (updating the tracker object in routing.html as per this GA SPA doc). I used the Polymer Starter Kit as a starting point. I'm not seeing any pageviews though, apart from / - what's the suggested way of tracking app usage?
routing.html
page('/topstories', function () {
app.route = 'topstories';
window.ga('set', 'page', '/topstories');
});
page('/about', function () {
app.route = 'about';
window.ga('set', 'page', '/about');
});
index.html
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-xxxxxxxxx-1', 'auto');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>

Answer 1

In addition to setting the page value on the tracker, you also have to send the pageview hit to Google Analytics. In your route callback functions you'll need to add the line:
ga('send', 'pageview');
You could also write a function that does all this for you, so you don't have to repeat the set and send calls every time.
function updatePage(path) {
return function() {
app.route = path.slice(1);
ga('set', 'page', path);
ga('send', 'pageview');
}
}
The your page route declarations would look like this:
page('/topstories', updatePage('/topstories'));
page('/about', updatePage('/about'));

Answer 2

My solution takes advantage of the middleware-ish page.js handler:
// Routes
page('*', scrollToTop, closeDrawer, function(ctx, next) {
ga('set', 'page', ctx.path); // simply add
ga('send', 'pageview'); // these rows
next();
});
But this also fires as the / route is initialised, so to not double count visits, remove the final ga('send', 'pageview'); from your <script> block.