Rack::Tracker

Rationale

Most of the applications we're working on are using some sort of tracking/analytics service, Google Analytics comes first but its likely that more are added as the project grows. Normally you'd go ahead and add some partials to your application that will render out the needed tracking codes. As time passes by you'll find yourself with lots of tracking snippets, that will clutter your codebase :) When just looking at Analytics there are solutions like rack-google-analytics but they just soley tackle the existence of one service.

We wanted a solution that ties all services together in one place and offers an easy interface to drop in new services. This is why we created rack-tracker, a rack middleware that can be hooked up to multiple services and exposing them in a unified fashion. It comes in two parts, the first one is the actual middleware that you can add to the middleware stack the second part are the service-handlers that you're going to use in your application. It's easy to add your own custom handlers, but to get you startet we're shipping support for the following services out of the box:

• Google Analytics
• Facebook
• Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
• GoSquared

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rack-tracker'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rack-tracker

Usage

Add it to your middleware stack

config.middleware.use(Rack::Tracker) do
  handler :google_analytics, { tracker: 'U-XXXXX-Y' }
end

This will add Google Analytics as a tracking handler.

Google Analytics

• :anonymize_ip - sets the tracker to remove the last octet from all IP addresses, see https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApi_gat?hl=de#_gat._anonymizeIp for details.
• :cookie_domain - sets the domain name for the GATC cookies. Defaults to auto.
• :site_speed_sample_rate - Defines a new sample set size for Site Speed data collection, see https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiBasicConfiguration?hl=de#_gat.GA_Tracker_._setSiteSpeedSampleRate
• :adjusted_bounce_rate_timeouts - An array of times in seconds that the tracker will use to set timeouts for adjusted bounce rate tracking. See http://analytics.blogspot.ca/2012/07/tracking-adjusted-bounce-rate-in-google.html for details.
• :enhanced_link_attribution - Enables Enhanced Link Attribution.
• :advertising - Enables Display Features.
• :ecommerce - Enables Ecommerce Tracking.

Events

To issue Events from the server side just call the tracker method in your controller.

  def show
    tracker do |t|
      t.google_analytics :send, { type: 'event', category: 'button', action: 'click', label: 'nav-buttons', value: 'X' }
    end
  end

It will render the following to the site source:

  ga('send', { 'hitType': 'event', 'eventCategory': 'button', 'eventAction': 'click', 'eventLabel': 'nav-buttons', 'value': 'X' })

Ecommerce

You can even trigger ecommerce directly from within your controller:

  def show
    tracker do |t|
      t.google_analytics :ecommerce, { type: 'addItem', id: '1234', affiliation: 'Acme Clothing', revenue: '11.99', shipping: '5', tax: '1.29' }
    end
  end

Will give you this:

  ga('ecommerce:addItem', { 'id': '1234', 'affiliation': 'Acme Clothing', 'revenue': '11.99', 'shipping': '5', 'tax': '1.29'  })

To load the ecommerce-plugin, add some configuration to the middleware initialization. This is not needed for the above to work, but recommened, so you don't have to take care of the plugin on your own.

  config.middleware.use(Rack::Tracker) do
    handler :google_analytics, { tracker: 'U-XXXXX-Y', ecommerce: true}
  end

Facebook

• custom_audience - adds the Custom audience segmentation pixel

Conversions

To track Conversions from the server side just call the tracker method in your controller.

  def show
    tracker do |t|
      t.facebook :track, { id: '123456789', value: 1, currency: 'EUR' }
    end
  end

Will result in the following:

  window._fbq.push(["track", "123456789", {'value': 1, 'currency': 'EUR'}]);

Visual website Optimizer (VWO)

Just integrate the handler with your matching account_id and you will be ready to go

  use Rack::Tracker do
    handler :vwo, { account_id: 'YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID' }
  end

GoSquared

To enable GoSquared tracking:

config.middleware.use(Rack::Tracker) do
  handler :go_squared, { tracker: 'ABCDEFGH' }
end

This will add the tracker to the page like so:

  _gs('ABCDEFGH');

You can also set multiple named trackers if need be:

config.middleware.use(Rack::Tracker) do
  handler :go_squared, {
    trackers: {
      primaryTracker: 'ABCDEFGH',
      secondaryTracker: '1234567',
    }
  }
end

This will add the specified trackers to the page like so:

  _gs('ABCDEFGH', 'primaryTracker');
  _gs('1234567', 'secondaryTracker');

You can set a variety of options by passing the following settings. If you don't set any of the following options, they will be omitted from the rendered code.

• :anonymize_ip
• :cookie_domain
• :use_cookies
• :track_hash
• :track_local
• :track_params

Visitor Name

To track the visitor name from the server side, just call the tracker method in your controller.

  def show
    tracker do |t|
      t.go_squared :visitor_name, { name: 'John Doe' }
    end
  end

It will render the following to the site source:

  _gs("set", "visitorName", "John Doe");

Visitor Properties

To track visitor properties from the server side, just call the tracker method in your controller.

  def show
    tracker do |t|
      t.go_squared :visitor_info, { age: 35, favorite_food: 'pizza' }
    end
  end

It will render the following to the site source:

  _gs("set", "visitor", { "age": 35, "favorite_food": "pizza" });

Custom Handlers

Tough we give you handlers for a few tracking services right out of the box, you might be interested adding support for your custom tracking/analytics service.

Writing a handler is straight forward ;) and there are just a couple of methods that your class needs to implement.

Start with a plain ruby class that inherits from Rack::Tracker::Handler

class MyHandler <  Rack::Tracker::Handler
  ...
end

Second we need a method called #render which will take care of rendering a template.

def render
  Tilt.new( File.join( File.dirname(__FILE__), 'template', 'my_handler.erb') ).render(self)
end

This will render the template/my_handler.erb and inject the result into the source. You can be creative about where the template is stored, but we tend to have them around our actual handler code.

<script>
  console.log('my tracker: ' + <%= options.to_json %>)
</script>

Lets give it a try! We need to mount our new handler in the Rack::Tracker middleware

  config.middleware.use(Rack::Tracker) do
    handler MyTracker, { awesome: true }
  end

Everything you're passing to the handler will be available as #options in your template, so you'll also gain access to the env-hash belonging to the current request.

Run your application and make a request, the result of the above template can be found right before </head>. You can change the position in your handler-code:

class MyHandler <  Rack::Tracker::Handler
  self.position = :body

  ...
end

The snippit will then be rendered right before </body>.

To enable the tracker dsl functionality in your controllers you need to implement the track class method on your handler:

def self.track(name, *event)
  # do something with the event(s) to prepare them for your template
  # and return a hash with a signature like { name => event }
end

Checkout the existing handlers in lib/rack/tracker for some inspiration. :)

Contributing

First of all, thank you for your help! 💚

If you want a feature implemented, the best way to get it done is to submit a pull request that implements it. Tests, readme and changelog entries would be nice.

1. Fork it ( http://github.com/railslove/rack-tracker/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request