I have a small API written in node.js that has no website attached, it works only on AJAX calls. I want to know if it is possible to use Google Analytics, or other good Analytics tool to monitor traffic.
I think it depends on how you have things set up but I wonder if you couldn't just add the normal JavaScript tracking to your API since its JavaScript as well. In the event you cant do that you should check out the Measurement Protocol Overview, it will allow you to send the raw data to Google Analytics yourself.
Related
We couldn't find any code on Google Analytics Developers about how to enable Advertising Features for acccountId. Is it possible to make such request using API? If this isn't possible then gapi.client.analytics.management.remarketingAudience.insert({ seems pretty useless because you still need to do it manually. Any solution?
The API you mentioned is to create an audience segment.
You can't enable advertising features with API. You can enable it in Google Analytics interface or modifying code (in page or in GTM).
I am having some pages where I need to track page views and get data for reports. So I need to use some tracking events without using gtag.js.
I have tried solutions like GIF Request Parameters
But this solution was there in ga.js and its a legacy
The format used in your linked documentation is deprecated since Google introduced Universal Analytics in 2012.
However the current solution to send requests to Googke Analytics without a library, the Measurement Protocol, works broadly the same way. You have an endpoint (google-analytics.com/collect) and add the necessary parameters as described in the reference, depending on what kind of interaction you want to track. The endpoint returns a 200 http status and a gif (no matter if the request has actually been logged in analytics, this just confirms that you actually hit the server).
I want to add Google analytics manually on each pages and events in my website. Is there any ways to add Google analytics using REST api or any library in PHP. so i can track specific events of my website.
There is no REST API for Google Analytics. You will have to use one of the available libraries provided by Google.
To track particular events, you can use tag manager or simply use custom dimensions.
TL;DR, Google Analytics is great if all you ever use is their GUI dashboard. If you need API access, go with another service.
If you need to access analytics data programmatically, especially if you are using NodeJS, I suggest you use some other service besides Google. Their documentation is incredibly lacking, they try to pigeon-hole you into using a client library rather than steering you in the direction of a REST API, and authenticating is a nightmare. The new v4 API purportedly consists of a single endpoint that you need to query with a complex combination of HTTP body and query params. Again, documentation is nearly non-existent.
I have used Amplitude analytics in the past in my react Web app to send event data. However I just started with Google Tag Manager and noticed it does not run because being blocked by adBlockers. Amplitude was always functional because I loaded their Javascript SDK through NPM install 'github:amplitude/Amplitude-Javascript' and initialized it at app load with client API key. I like the approach of Google Tag manager where I dont have redeploy app to make changes to my analytics logic. How can I take a similar approach to avoiding being blocked by adblockers.
It may very well be that Google products are popular so Adblock specifically just block google analytics products not other analytics products.
You don't. If people don't want to be tracked, that is their decision. You should not be forcing people to provide you with any data they do not want to provide. Especially by using some shady "bypassing" measures. Instead-
You could use a cookie to permanently disable your tracking of those who do not wish to be tracked, to help you preserve reliable analytics. See: http://www.multiminds.eu/2016/05/19/how-to-disable-tracking-via-google-tag-manager/
Or, better yet, simply measure the percentage of visitors who have disabled tracking so your analytical data can remain accurate. See: https://marthijnhoiting.com/detect-if-someone-is-blocking-google-analytics-or-google-tag-manager/
Yes, it's possible.
You can use reverse proxy for Google Tag Manager.
First, download the Google Analytics JavaScript library itself and host it on your server.
Then alter the code in the downloaded library to change the target host from www.google-analytics.com to your own domain name using find-replace.
Replace the link from the default Google Analytics script in your codebase to modified one.
Create a proxy endpoint to Google Analytics servers on your back end. One important step here is to additionally detect the client’s IP address and write it explicitly in requests to Google Analytics servers to preserve correct location detection.
Test the results. You’re done!
more detail info on freecodecamp.org/news/save-your-analytics-from-content-blockers and https://analytics-bypassing-adblockers.netlify.com
There's dataunlocker.com as well as some other open source alternatives (1, 2) which can help to fix reporting accuracy of Google Tag Manager, Amplitude, Google Analytics etc.
Talking about ethics and privacy, tools like DataUnlocker are just tools which allow you to bypass ad blockers as if you have implemented server-side analytics. I think by correctly implementing that "we use cookies" consent one can solve any privacy concerns.
I've managed to get around some blockers with the following in a node app:
var request = require('request');
app.get('/proxy*', function(req,res) {
const newurl = req.url.split('/proxy/')[1];
const data = request(newurl);
//data.on('response', function(response){console.log(JSON.stringify(response))});
data.pipe(res);
});
Then in your snippets for GTM prepend: "/proxy/" in the url and now the call goes via your server.
The caveat with the above is that without additional code you can't preview the container, but the container does load correctly. Lack of preview is a different issue to deal with.
I am trying to make the google analytic __utm.gif request using php. I have broken all the variables and the only one which I don't know about is utmu parameter. It is not documented anywhere.
When I see a pageview tracking request it is appended to the end of request as &utmu=qB~
While doing ecommerce tracking it is appended as &utmu=qBAL~
Please help me with this.
It is a bitmap of all of the methods used to build the request.
Source: http://glucik.blogspot.com/2011/02/utmu-google-analytics-request-parameter.html
utmu doesn't actually contain anything of external meaning. Google uses it to store some internal values that help them improve ga.js. It's not required to make any functionality work, so, your PHP code doesn't need to account for it.
However, you should know there are already a few long-standing PHP-based Google Analytics projects, like Server Side Google Analytics (SSGA), as well as the semi-official Google Analytics for Mobile PHP and PHPGA.