jhilden / ga_events

Google Analytics' Event Tracking everywhere in your Rails app

GaEvents

Use Google Analytics' Event Tracking everywhere in your Rails app!

This gem alllows you to annotate events everywhere in the code of your Rails app. A rack middleware is automatically inserted into the stack. It transports the event data to the client. Normal requests get a DIV injected, Ajax requests get a data-pounded custom HTTP header appended. In case of redirects the data survives inside Rails' flash. The asset pipeline-ready CoffeeScript extracts this data on the client-side and pushes it to Google Analytics via ga.js or Google Tag Manager.

Dependencies

• Rails 3.1 onwards
• jQuery

Installation

Add it to your Gemfile with:

gem 'ga_events'

Run the bundle command to install it.

Add to the top of your application.js (but after requiring jQuery):

//= require ga_events.js

After requiring ga_events.js, choose an adapter.

For stock Google Analytics (ga.js) use:

GaEvents.Event.adapter = function() {
  return new GaEvents.GoogleAnalyticsAdapter();
}

If you are using Google Tag Manager you can add custom events which are then passed through to Google Analytics.

GaEvents.Event.adapter = function() {
  return new GaEvents.GoogleTagManagerAdapter("event_name"); // defaults to ga_event
}

If you are using a staging system you can use the NullAdapter.

GaEvents.Event.adapter = function() {
  return new GaEvents.NullAdapter();
}

Usage

On the server-side a new event is added to a list, serialized into a container element and then added to your HTML response. On Ajax requests a custom HTTP header is added to the response.

You can create a new event like this:

GaEvents::Event.new(category, action, label, value)

On the client-side there is a similar interface to GaEvents:

new GaEvents.Event(category, action, label, value)

We have taken special care of tracking events while the DOM is loading. Events get collected until the DOM is ready and flushed afterwards.

Too many events

Use something like this snippet to get informed of bloating HTTP headers with event data:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  after_filter :too_many_ga_events?
  private
  def too_many_ga_events?
    if (serialized = GaEvents::List.to_s).length > 1_024
      notify("GaEvents too big: #{serialized}")
    end
    true
  end
end

Contributing

Yes please! Use pull requests.

More docs and tools

• Google Analytics: Event Tracking
• Google Tag Manager: Custom Events
• Chrome Web Store: Event Tracking Tracker