I have a project called BRPS, which has an old client script brps.js. Whenever this client request data from BRPS server, the server will increase the requests count and it has a statistics page for showing the count. Recently, a new client is implemented, gas.js. This new client doesnt communicate with BRPS server, I need to find a way to get a statistic number about how many requests it has been made. I dont want to write more code on my server to log those requests. So, Google Analytics is the best option for me.

1   Non-asynchronous method

function _track() {
  try {
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-#######-#");
    pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
    pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
    }
  catch(err) {
    }
  }
if (window._gat) {
  _track();
  }
else {
  $.getScript(('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js', function(){
      _track();
      });
  }

With the code above, my script can track requests from different domains1, which are not mine. I didnt assign a path via pageTracker._trackPageview('/path/something'), because I want to see where exactly the request are made from. The UA-#######-# is only used by this script and I dont need to log status such as /status/success or /status/failed.

2   Filters

I created a new profile and two more based on the first one. The last two are using filter each. The first filter is

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4145/5015391847_4ea860f041_b.jpg
Custom filter Advanced  
FieldA Hostname (.*)
FieldB Request URI (.*)
Output Request URI $A1$B1

The profile with this filter can see results like example.com/foobar. A sample output:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4125/5015391907_53b3980f71_z.jpg

The second one is

Custom filter Advanced  
FieldA Hostname (.*)
FieldB unused  
Output Request URI $A1

The profile with this filter can see results like example.com, I would like to know which websites are top users. A sample output:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4089/5016000652_460119ec27_z.jpg

3   Asynchronous method

I knew there was a method called asynchronous tracking. But I wasnt catching it when I saw the code using JavaScript Array _gaq[] to store commands. At first, I thought thats kind of bad. They embedded ga.js to read that array every time? Did script clean it up?

I was wrong until I read this:

When Analytics finishes loading, it replaces the array with the _gaq object and executes all the queued commands. Subsequent calls to _gaq.push resolve to this function, which executes commands as they are pushed.

So, my _track() needs a little modification:

function _track() {
  var _gaq = window._gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-#######-#']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);
  _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', 'true']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  if (!window._gaq)
    window._gaq = _gaq;
  }

4   Updates

  • 2010-09-25T23:48:40+0800: Add Asynchronous method section
[1]http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55503 is gone.