CKAN Google Analytics Extension

Status: Production

CKAN Version: >= 1.5.*

A CKAN extension that both sends tracking data to Google Analytics and retrieves statistics from Google Analytics and inserts them into CKAN pages.

Features

• 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.

  ckanext.googleanalytics.plugin._post_analytics

Installation

1. 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

2. 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 = 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. 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).

4. 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

   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 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.

Domain Linking

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 for more information

Setting Up Statistics Retrieval from Google Analytics

1. 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

2. 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.

3. Follow the steps in the Authorization section below.

4. Restart CKAN (e.g. by restarting Apache)

5. Wait a while for some stats to be recorded in Google

6. 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

7. 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.

8. Consider running the import command reguarly as a cron job, or remember to run it by hand, or your statistics won't get updated.

Authorization

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 the outcome of which will be a file with authentication key. These steps are below for convenience:

1. Visit the Google APIs Console
2. Sign-in and create a project or use an existing project.
3. In the Service accounts pane 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.
4. Save downloaded file - it will be used by loadanalytics command(referenced as <credentials.json>)
5. Go to GoogleAnalytics console and chose ADMIN tab.
6. 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.

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)