CKAN Google Analytics Extension =============================== **Status:** Production **CKAN Version:** 1.5.* Overview -------- A CKAN extension for doing things with Google Analytics: * It puts the relevant tracking code in your templates for you (including tracking code for external resource download links) * It provides a page showing top packages and resources * It inserts download stats onto individual package pages Installation ------------ 1. Install the extension as usual, e.g. (from an activated virtualenv): :: $ pip install -e git+https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-googleanalytics.git#egg=ckanext-googleanalytics 2. Edit your development.ini (or similar) to provide these necessary parameters: :: googleanalytics.id = UA-1010101-1 googleanalytics.username = googleaccount@gmail.com 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. 3. 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 4. Edit again your configuration ini file to activate the extension 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.show_downloads = true googleanalytics.track_events = false ``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 `_ for more info. If ``show_downloads`` is set, a download count for resources will be displayed on individual package pages. If ``track_events`` is set, Google Analytics event tracking will be enabled. 5. Restart CKAN (e.g. by restarting Apache) 6. Wait a while for some stats to be recorded in Google 7. Import Google stats by running the following command from ``src/ckanext-googleanalytics``:: paster loadanalytics --config=../ckan/development.ini (Of course, pointing config at your specific site config) 8. 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. 9. Consider running the import command reguarly as a cron job, or remember to run it by hand, or your statistics won't get updated. Testing ------- 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) Future ------ 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)