Say, I'm developing a Windows (if OS is important) application that will be available to download for free and I would like then to collect some usage statistics. In the easiest case - count of application launches. It looks superfluous to maintain a server (e.g. VDS) just for this.
I've been thinking to use Google Analytics for this (manually send requests to GA server). This will probably work, but it is not GA designed for - the idea looks like a hack.
What are the options here?
I don't think this is a hack. It's all just data about user interaction. There is little logical difference between opening a desktop app and clicking a button vs opening a web page and following a link. Both are measurable user actions you can track, aggregate and put on graphs.
In fact, Google provides a lower level HTTP based "Measurement Protocol" that is intended for exactly that.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/
From the overview:
The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol allows developers to make
HTTP requests to send raw user interaction data directly to Google
Analytics servers. This allows developers to measure how users
interact with their business from almost any environment
Just put an HTTP request with the correct parameters in your application launch or button click code and it will collect the data. Any data you want to collect.
In other answers to this question there are suggestions like making web services or storing the data locally but why reinvent the wheel? Google Analytics already provides the collecting and reporting tools and it seems like a good solution.
Related
I am working on a project to remove gtag based tracking from a website. We have concerns about not being able to implement tracking due to poor network connections. The ideal solution would be to handle conversion tracking on the backend when we receive a purchase request (so as not to send too many requests.) It seems that Google Analytics Measurement Protocol would be the correct tool for the job. However, this (somewhat frustrating) note mentions that "only partial reporting may be available."
We have explored server side GTM, but that still adds unwanted network requests and is not the approach we want to go for. It seems that there are workarounds such as in this question, but they seem pretty precarious. Is there any other api available, or approach that might fit the use case we are looking for?
I want use Google Assistant from my phone to send HTTP POST command to my server. I have a simple webnms app running over it, this server support REST API and now I want to use Google Assistant to shoot GET or POST command to that server and return my output.
Is it something possible? I am not full time developer.
Yes, as #Prisoner says it is possible. It is not what you asked - but have you seen these ways that Google provides to get skills published without requiring a lot of developer savvy?
https://developers.google.com/actions/content-actions/
https://developers.google.com/actions/templates/first-app
I don't speak for them, but IMO Google's target audience for Action building apart from the above is those who have at least some familiarity with the JavaScript language and its "run-time" Node.
There is also this - which I haven't tried by the way.
https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/digital-home/easy-actions-google-assistant-3665372/
In case it is not obvious, Google Actions are essentially websites that interact with Google's assistant running on a Home device or a smart phone, say. Think of the Assistant as a browser initiating requests and your Action as serving them. If you can (build and?) deploy a server that handles POSTS over HTTPS on a publicly addressable URL, and if you can understand the JSON payload that the Assistant sends and respond with appropriate JSON to carry out you application then you are good to go.
Where you don't have a public IP address - e.g. in testing - you can use a tool like ngrok ( https://ngrok.com/ ) to reverse proxy requests emanating from the Assistant to your server.
I have slides for a presentation I did targeting fledgling developers who had never built an Action here
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lGxmoMDZLFSievf5phoQVmlp85ofWZ2LDjNnH6wx7UY/edit?usp=sharing
and the code that goes with it here
https://github.com/unclewill/parrot
On the upside the code is about as simple as it gets. On the downside it does almost nothing. In particular, it doesn't try to understand language. As #Prisoner says you'll likely need a tool like Dialog Flow for that.
Yes, it is possible.
Your server will need to implement the Actions on Google API. This is a REST API which will accept JSON containing what the user is intending to do and specific information about what they have said. Your server will need to send back JSON indicating the reply, along with additional information about how to continue the conversation.
You will likely also want to use a tool such as Dialogflow to handle building the conversational script and converting a user's phrases into something that makes sense to you. You'll also need to use the Actions on Google console to manage your Action and provide additional details about how users contact your Action. All of this is explained in the Actions on Google documentation.
Simple Actions are fairly easy to develop, and can certainly be done by a developer as a hobby. Good Actions, however, take a lot more thought and planning. Google offers you to the tools - it is up to you to best take advantage of them.
I've found the solution.
In the "Action" console https://console.actions.google.com/project/sandbox-csuite/scenes/Start
Go to menu "Webhook", click "Change fulfillment method", and then select "HTTPS endpoint"
I've been searching for many hours, but I havent been able to come up with a solution to the following problem:
I want to be able to test the implementation of Google Analytics in an app, in real real time. Using google real-time analytics is insufficient, because you sometimes have to wait several minutes for your new tag to show up.
A solution should be packet sniffing through Wireshark. I've attempted to do this, But even when I do find some analytics related calls, I cant seem to extract any useful information from them.(I have to admit, I dont know enough about networks to understand wireshark's features....)
Another solution should be using a proxy like Fiddler or Charles. I tried both, set up SSL, rooted an android phone to make sure all the traffic was using the proxy, but even then I'm not able to find any google analytics calls from my app.It seems like I'm looking in the wrong place or something, but for websites I do see these GA calls come by.
What am I doing wrong? It's so easy to find this stuff on web, and so far it has seemed impossible to get if from an app. Any help is appreciated.
By default Google Analytics uploads the hits data over SSL connection. It might be difficult for Wireshark to see inside the encrypted connection. The HTTP stack will likely check the certificates and refuse to talk to the wrong server as well. You can change the upload to non-SSL (plain HTTP) by calling tracker.setUserSecure(false):
https://developer.android.com/reference/com/google/android/gms/analytics/Tracker.html#setUseSecure(boolean)
That should allow you to see the uploads with Wireshark or any other packet analyzer. Make sure you don't ship your application with this setting.
The hits will also have some delay before they are uploaded over the network. If you are running on Google Play device (or emulator with Google Play Services) your hits will be dispatched by Google Play within few minutes. When running on non-Google Play devices (or emulator without Google Play Services) you can set the dispatch interval with googleAnalytics.setLocalDispatchPeriod(int seconds) call or explicitly trigger a dispatch with googleAnalytics.dispatchLocalHits()
If I build a website for my new awesome mobile app (or web service or whatever) I might want to do a slow launch, sending email invites to the first x people to register on the site.
Is there a good way to link each registered email to the corresponding data in google analytics (or any similar service), and query them based on location, language, etc.?
Maybe the spanish version isn't quite done yet, so I don't want to invite people who used a spanish browser to sign up. Or maybe my app is location-dependent (like time tables for buses) and just doesn't work at all outside of my home town.
I really want to have a simple email-only "registration".
It is completely possible, although it may breach some of GA's terms of use if done wrong.
You should not store email addresses in any way as part of your GA data because it would be considered personally identifiable data. However, there is nothing saying that you couldn't store a kind of GUID for each user, and then compare that with email addresses offline - although the user should be made aware that any actions they take while using your service/application/whatever are being tracked with the capability of being personally identified.
As far as getting the actual data that you are discussing, language and location are stored by GA by default, so no headache there!
The best way to store the user's GUID would probably be in a custom dimension. How you do this is going to depend on how you build your product. I had to write a tracking library using the measurement protocol for an AS3 project awhile back because there isn't an AS3 library that is supported anymore. If you are using JavaScript, it will be much easier, as Google offers native JS libraries to handle web analytics.
Finally, try taking a look at the documentation. Its pretty easy to understand
I build ASP.NET websites (hosted under IIS 6 usually, often with SQL Server backends and forms authentication).
Clients sometimes ask if I can check whether there are people currently browsing (and/or whether there are users currently logged in to) their website at a given moment, usually so the can safely do a deployment (they want a hotfix, for example).
I know the web is basically stateless so I can't be sure whether someone has closed the browser window, but I imagine there'd be some count of not-yet-timed-out sessions or something, and surely logged-in-users...
Is there a standard and/or easy way to check this?
Jakob's answer is correct but does rely on installing and configuring the Membership features.
A crude but simple way of tracking users online would be to store a counter in the Application object. This counter could be incremented/decremented upon their sessions starting and ending. There's an example of this on the MSDN website:
Session-State Events (MSDN Library)
Because the default Session Timeout is 20 minutes the accuracy of this method isn't guaranteed (but then that applies to any web application due to the stateless and disconnected nature of HTTP).
I know this is a pretty old question, but I figured I'd chime in. Why not use Google Analytics and view their real time dashboard? It will require minor code modifications (i.e. a single script import) and will do everything you're looking for...
You may be looking for the Membership.GetNumberOfUsersOnline method, although I'm not sure how reliable it is.
Sessions, suggested by other users, are a basic way of doing things, but are not too reliable. They can also work well in some circumstances, but not in others.
For example, if users are downloading large files or watching videos or listening to the podcasts, they may stay on the same page for hours (unless the requests to the binary data are tracked by ASP.NET too), but are still using your website.
Thus, my suggestion is to use the server logs to detect if the website is currently used by many people. It gives you the ability to:
See what sort of requests are done. It's quite easy to detect humans and crawlers, and with some experience, it's also possible to see if the human is currently doing something critical (such as writing a comment on a website, editing a document, or typing her credit card number and ordering something) or not (such as browsing).
See who is doing those requests. For example, if Google is crawling your website, it is a very bad idea to go offline, unless the search rating doesn't matter for you. On the other hand, if a bot is trying for two hours to crack your website by doing requests to different pages, you can go offline for sure.
Note: if a website has some critical areas (for example, writing this long answer, I would be angry if Stack Overflow goes offline in a few seconds just before I submit my answer), you can also send regular AJAX requests to the server while the user stays on the page. Of course, you must be careful when implementing such feature, and take in account that it will increase the bandwidth used, and will not work if the user has JavaScript disabled).
You can run command netstat and see how many active connection exist to your website ports.
Default port for http is *:80.
Default port for https is *:443.