Episode #493 – September 5th, 2014

Reading Rails talks TimeWithZone, descriptive_statistics, new gems in Rails 4.2, Paperdragon, and using Ruby’s English operators all in this episode of the Ruby5 podcast!

Tracking AJAX-driven events in Ruby on Rails for Google Analytics conversion goals

October 21, 2009

Tracking your KPI’s is extremely important in your online venture. At a minimum, you should be using something like Google Analytics to track conversions in your application. Setting up goals is actually quite simple, especially if you’re just tracking that specific pages are loaded. However, if some of your conversion points occur through AJAX, you might not be capturing those activities in Google Analytics.

Lucky for you, it’s actually quite simple to update this. I thought I’d show you a fairly simple example to help you along.

On our web site, we have a mini contact form at the bottom of many of our pages. When submitted, if JavaScript is enabled, it’ll perform an Ajax request to submit the form. If you fill out the main Get in Touch form that gets processed and we redirect people to a thank you page. The URL for that is unique and we’re able to track those in Google Analytics quite easily.

However, with the Ajax-form, the URL in the browser isn’t going to change so Google Analytics isn’t going to track that conversion. So, we needed to track that properly.

To do this, we just need to call a JavaScript function that the Google Analytics code provides you.

  pageTracker._trackPageview("/contact_requests/thanks");

Let’s look at some simple code from our controller action. If the request is from JavaScript, we currently replace the form area with the content in a partial. (note: if you’re curious about the _x, read Designers, Developers and the x_ factor)

  respond_to do |format|
    format.html { redirect_to :action => :thanks }
    format.js do
      render :update do |page|
        page.replace :x_mini_contact_form_module, :partial => 'mini_contact_form_thanks'
      end
    end
  end

As you can see, the redirect will within the format.html block will lead people to our conversion point. However, the format.js block will keep the user on the current page and it’ll not trigger Google Analytics to track the conversion. To make this happen, we’ll just sprinkle in the following line of code.

  page.call 'pageTracker._trackPageview("/contact_requests/thanks");'

However, if you need to do something like this in several locations in your application, you might want to just extend the JavaScriptGenerator page. GeneratorMethods. (you could toss this in lib/, create a plugin, etc…)

  module ActionView
    module Helpers
      module PrototypeHelper
        class JavaScriptGenerator #:nodoc:
          module GeneratorMethods
            # Calls the Google Analytics pageTracker._trackPageview function with +path+.
            #
            # Examples:
            #
            #
            #  # Triggers: pageTracker._trackPageview('/contact_requests/thanks');
            #  page.track_page_view '/contact_requests/thanks'
            #
            def track_page_view(path)
             record "pageTracker._trackPageview('#{path}');"
            end
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end

This will allow us to do the following:

  page.track_page_view "/contact_requests/thanks"

  # or using a route/path
  page.track_page_view thanks_contact_requests_path

So, our updated code now looks like:

render :update do |page|
  page.replace :x_mini_contact_form_module, :partial => 'mini_contact_form_thanks'
  page.track_page_view thanks_contact_requests_path
end

With this in place, we can sprinkle similar code for our various conversion points that are Ajax-driven and Google Analytics will pick it up.

Happy tracking!

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