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 group links on the home page, user profile links, editing and saving user profiles, etc.

  Only if googleanalytics.track_events = true is in your CKAN ini file.

  CKAN 1.x only.

• Puts download stats into dataset pages, e.g. "[downloaded 4 times]".

  CKAN 1.x only.

• Provides a /analytics/dataset/top page that shows the most popular datasets and resources

  CKAN 1.x only

CKAN 1.x Support

To use ckanext-googleanalytics with CKAN 1.x, make sure you have ckan.legacy_templates = true in your CKAN ini file.

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

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. If you are using this plugin with a version of CKAN < 2.0 then you should also put the following in your ini file:

   ckan.legacy_templates = true

5. Finally, there are some optional configuration settings (shown here with their default settings):

   googleanalytics_resource_prefix = /downloads/
   googleanalytics.domain = auto
   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 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.

Setting Up Statistics Retrieval from Google Analytics

CKAN 1.x only

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 token.dat --config=../ckan/development.ini

   (Of course, pointing config at your specific site config and token.dat at the oauth file generated from the authorization step)

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

CKAN 1.x only

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 called credentials.json which should look like credentials.json.template with the relevant fields completed. 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 Services pane , activate Analytics API for your project. If prompted, read and accept the terms of service.
4. Go to the API Access pane
5. Click Create an OAuth 2.0 client ID....
6. Fill out the Branding Information fields and click Next.
7. In Client ID Settings, set Application type to Installed application.
8. Click Create client ID
9. The details you need below are Client ID, Client secret, and Redirect URIs

Once you have set up your credentials.json file you can generate an oauth token file by using the following command, which will store your oauth token in a file called token.dat once you have finished giving permission in the browser:

$ paster getauthtoken --config=../ckan/development.ini

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)