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  hg+https://bitbucket.org/okfn/ckanext-googleanalytics#package=/ckanext-googleanalytics

2. Edit your development.ini (or similar) with:

   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.

   There are two optional configuration settings (shown with their default settings):

   googleanalytics.show_downloads = true
   googleanalytics.resource_prefix = /downloads/

   If show_downloads is set, a download count for resources will be displayed on individual package pages.

   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.

3. Wait a day or so for some stats to be recorded in Google

4. 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)

5. 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/package/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.

6. Consider putting the import command as a daily cron job, or remember to run it by hand!

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)