How to Conditionally Load Google Analytics in a Web Application

Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 February 2013 08:44 Written by David Bauernschmidt Saturday, 2 March 2013 12:00

If you are a developer that uses Google Analytics in your ASP.net web applications then you know that loading up the Google Analytics in your web page should not happen when you are building the application. In the past I have always just commented out the section for Google Analytics until publishing the site. Then I would go in and uncomment the lines. This works if you do not forget to uncomment the lines in production. (This happened to me).

I decided that there had to be a better way to automatically do this. After searching the internet and pulling together prior knowledge of how an asp.net web site works I decided to use the web.config to help me. First add the following lines to your web.config production transformation file. (See here if you do not understand the transformation idea).

Using Google Analytics to Track PDF Views

Last Updated on Saturday, 23 February 2013 01:37 Written by David Bauernschmidt Wednesday, 27 February 2013 12:00

I currently build and manage a pro-bono site for Greenwood Christian Academy where they have a lot of PDF documents.  The users click on documents for enrollment, calendars, educational forms, health documents, etc.  Just recently they also announced an event that offers sponsorships.  The question that has come up lately is how to use Google Analytics to track how many people view the pdf documents and how many people click on the sponsor links.  This may sound simple but then I realized that Google does not track counts for links that go away from the site or to pdf views.  Not accepting this as failure, I started looking around and came across a “cool” feature that Google offers called ‘_trackEvent’.  You can use this for a multitude of things but I believe this is what I need.  The key is to realize that you need to attach something to the <a href> before the actual redirect.  Since I always use the pdf and external links with a target=’_blank’ I decided to attach an event handler to the <a href>.  The problem is this could take a while, especially if you have a lot of links and pdf.  Thank goodness for jquery.  I attached the code below as close to the end of the page as possible (preferably right before the </body>).  This script attaches a click event to every <a href> if there is a target=’_blank’.  I then determine if it is a pdf or just a “plain” link.

How to Install Google Analytics Into TomatoCart

Last Updated on Thursday, 31 January 2013 07:12 Written by Jack Yin Saturday, 2 February 2013 12:00

Google Analytics is a free tool to analyze your website traffic. This article guides on how to install Google Analytics tool into your TomatoCart store.

1. Create a Google Analytics account
   Sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics and set up your web property.
2. Get the tracking code
   After setting up an account and your web property, you will be redirected to the admin panel of Google Analytics.

nopCommerce Tips: How to Activate Google Analytics in Your nopCommerce Store

Last Updated on Wednesday, 19 September 2012 07:07 Written by Carole Bennett Friday, 28 September 2012 12:00

Tracking your site traffic is a key component in fine-tuning your nopCommerce website, your product offerings, and optimizing your sales. One of the very best free tools for this is Google Analytics. Thankfully, that’s natively supported by nopCommerce; here’s how to set it up.

We will begin with the prerequisite that you’ve already set up a Google Analytics account for this site. If you haven’t already done so, start here. Once you have your UA number generated, we’ll move on to updating our nopCommerce site.

In nopCommerce Administration, go to Configuration>Settings>All Settings. Under “Setting Name”, use the funnel icon to search for all settings that contain “analytics”. You’ll see the setting “googleanalyticssettings.googleid”, with a null ID. Edit this line, and enter your site’s proper UA ID, and save the value.

What is Piwik?

Last Updated on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 03:07 Written by Arian Jahansouz Wednesday, 13 June 2012 12:00

What exactly is Piwik? Maybe you have seen it while browsing Softaculous or Windows Web App Gallery, but do you know what it does?

What is Piwik?