Status: Production
CKAN Version: >= 2.7
A CKAN extension that both sends tracking data to Google Analytics and retrieves statistics from Google Analytics and inserts them into CKAN pages.
Puts the Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code into your page headers for basic Google Analytics page tracking.
Adds Google Analytics Event Tracking to resource download links, so that resource downloads will be displayed as Events in the Google Analytics reporting interface.
Adds Google Analytics Event Tracking to some API calls so that usage of the API can be reported on via Google Analytics.
Add Google Analytics Event Tracking function that can be used in any exstension to create your custom events tracking.
CKAN Extensions
ckanext.googleanalytics.plugin._post_analytics
Install the extension as usual, e.g. (from an activated virtualenv):
$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-googleanalytics.git#egg=ckanext-googleanalytics
$ pip install -r ckanext-googleanalytics/requirements.txt
Edit your development.ini (or similar) to provide these necessary parameters:
googleanalytics.id = UA-1010101-1
googleanalytics.account = Account name (i.e. data.gov.uk, see top level item at https://www.google.com/analytics)
googleanalytics.username = [email protected]
googleanalytics.password = googlepassword
Note that your password will probably be readable by other people; so you may want to set up a new gmail account specifically for accessing your gmail profile.
Edit again your configuration ini file to activate the plugin with:
ckan.plugins = googleanalytics
(If there are other plugins activated, add this to the list. Each plugin should be separated with a space).
Finally, there are some optional configuration settings (shown here with their default settings)
googleanalytics_resource_prefix = /downloads/
googleanalytics.domain = auto
googleanalytics.track_events = false
googleanalytics.fields = {}
googleanalytics.enable_user_id = false
googleanalytics.download_handler = ckan.views.resource:download
resource_prefix is an arbitrary identifier so that we can query
for downloads in Google Analytics. It can theoretically be any
string, but should ideally resemble a URL path segment, to make
filtering for all resources easier in the Google Analytics web
interface.
domain allows you to specify a domain against which Analytics will
track users. You will usually want to leave this as auto; if you
are tracking users from multiple subdomains, you might want to
specify something like .mydomain.com. See
Google's documentation <http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApiDomainDirectory.html#_gat.GA_Tracker_._setDomainName>_
for more info.
If track_events is set, Google Analytics event tracking will be
enabled. CKAN 1.x only. Note that event tracking for resource
downloads is always enabled, track_events enables event tracking
for other pages as well.
fields allows you to specify various options when creating the
tracker. See
Google's documentation <https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/field-reference>.
If enable_user_id is set to true, then logged in users will be
tracked into the Google Analytics’ dashboard. This way metrics can
be tracked for every logged in user. You can read more about this
feature and its benefits
here <https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3123662>_.
When resource is downloaded, ckanext-googleanalytics posts event to
GA and calls default download callback. If you are using
CKAN>=2.9 and some of your plugins redefines resource.download
route(ckanext-cloudstorage, for example), you can specify which
function must be called instead of ckan.views.resource:download
via ckanext.googleanalytics.download_handler config variable. For
ckanext-cloudstorage you can use:
ckanext.googleanalytics.download_handler = ckanext.cloudstorage.views:download
This plugin supports cross-domain tracking using Googles’ site linking feature.
To use this, set the googleanalytics.linked_domains configuration
option to a (comma seperated) list of domains to report for.
See
Googles' documentation<https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en>_
for more information
Run the following command from src/ckanext-googleanalytics to set
up the required database tables (of course, altering the --config
option to point to your site config file):
paster initdb --config=../ckan/development.ini
Optionally, add::
googleanalytics.show_downloads = true
to your CKAN ini file. If show_downloads is set, a download count
for resources will be displayed on individual package pages.
Follow the steps in the Authorization section below.
Restart CKAN (e.g. by restarting Apache)
Wait a while for some stats to be recorded in Google
Import Google stats by running the following command from
src/ckanext-googleanalytics::
paster loadanalytics credentials.json --config=../ckan/development.ini
(Of course, pointing config at your specific site config and
credentials.json at the key file obtained from the authorization
step) Ignore warning
ImportError: file_cache is unavailable when using oauth2client >= 4.0.0
Look at some stats within CKAN
Once your GA account has gathered some data, you can see some basic information about the most popular packages at: http://mydomain.com/analytics/dataset/top
By default the only data that is injected into the public-facing website is on the package page, where number of downloads are displayed next to each resource.
Consider running the import command reguarly as a cron job, or remember to run it by hand, or your statistics won’t get updated.
Before ckanext-googleanalytics can retrieve statistics from Google
Analytics, you need to set up the OAUTH details which you can do by
following the
instructions <https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v3/quickstart/service-py>_
the outcome of which will be a file with authentication key. These steps
are below for convenience:
Visit the
Google APIs Console <https://code.google.com/apis/console>_
Sign-in and create a project or use an existing project.
In the
Service accounts pane <https://console.developers.google.com/iam-admin/serviceaccounts>_
choose your project and create new account. During creation check
“Furnish a new private key” -> JSON type. Write down “Service
account ID”(looks like email) - it will be used later.
Save downloaded file - it will be used by loadanalytics
command(referenced as <credentials.json>)
Go to
GoogleAnalytics console <https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#management>_
and chose ADMIN tab.
Find “User management” button in corresponding column. Add service account using Service account ID(email) generated in 3rd step and grant “Read” role to it.
There are some very high-level functional tests that you can run using::
(pyenv)~/pyenv/src/ckan$ nosetests --ckan ../ckanext-googleanalytics/tests/
(note – that’s run from the CKAN software root, not the extension root)
This is a bare-bones, first release of the software. There are several directions it could take in the future.
Because we use Google Analytics for recording statistics, we can hook into any of its features. For example, as a measure of popularity, we could record bounce rate, or new visits only; we could also display which datasets are popular where, or highlight packages that have been linked to from other locations.
We could also embed extra metadata information in tracking links, to enable reports on particular types of data (e.g. most popular data format by country of origin, or most downloaded resource by license)