Google Analytics fun

Getting the data

You probably know that Google Analytics is website access tracking tool. It works by inserting a tiny snippet of JavaScript code into all your HTML documents that makes clients' browser report various stuff about itself.

My site is mostly made of various static documents which gathered over the years, along with a blog generated by a templating engine (not dissimilar to bloxsom or jekyll) and document with search results dynamically generated with ht://dig. Apart from my unwilingliness to pollute the clean HTML with the GA script, adding the snippets to all the documents may not be an easiest task either.

Fortunatelly, with the site served by Apache httpd, filters are here to help. They can be written in C, but I'm more comfortable with doing this in Perl, mod_perl here to help. I've hacked a simple filter to do the job: Apache2::Filter::GoogleAnalytics: get it from CPAN.

Unless some good person packages this, installation is an usual Module::Build mantra (you'll need mod_perl first):

  yum -y install mod_perl
  perl Build.PL
  su -c './Build install'

Then you need to enable it in httpd.conf and you're done:

  PerlLoadModule Apache2::Filter::GoogleAnalytics
  <Location /to-analyze>
          WebPropertyID UA-80868086-2
          PerlOutputFilterHandler Apache2::Filter::GoogleAnalytics
  </Location>

Now what?

So now you collect data for a day or two. You can inspect it via the web console Google provides. Alternatively, they provide API to connect other tools with your data; which is where GoodData comes.

My colleagues spent some time creating a connector for Google Analytics, which lets you upload the analtics data and provides a couple of dashborads with pre-created reports; here's how they look:

Might be pretty boring if you expected a lot more than you can see in the Google-provided console. The real win is that you can now upload more data sets from various other sources and join it with your analytics data to get more complex report. Feel free to try it yourself.

First published

Tue Dec 21 09:05:24 2010 -0500

Last changed

Tue Dec 21 09:05:24 2010 -0500

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