Google Pageviews

README.md

Set Up

You will need Sija's version of the garb gem, so add this line to your Gemfile (you will need git installed for this):

gem 'garb', :git => 'git://github.com/Sija/garb.git'

Then run the gem bundler: bundle install

Set your google username

username = ''

Put in your google password (create a secondary account for this with a really long randomly generated password)

password = ''

Get an api key for google analytics from here: https://code.google.com/apis/console and set the api_key:

api_key = ''

pick your property from the google analytics interface ( http://google.com/analytics ) and set it:

ua = ''

Then add the contents of google_pageviews.erb to your layout file.

If you change the dimensions from :month make sure you update the data-moreinfo line so that it matches the interval.

google_pageviews.erb

<li data-row="1" data-col="1" data-sizex="1" data-sizey="1">
  <div data-id="page_views" 
       data-view="Number" 
       data-title="Views"
       data-moreinfo="This Month" style="background-color:#869;"></div>
  <i class="icon-link icon-background"></i>
</li>

google_pageviews.rb

require 'garb'

# google username
username = ''
# google password
password = ''
# google api key
api_key  = ''

# google analytics ua (make sure the UA- is there)
ua = 'UA-'

Garb::Session.api_key = api_key
Garb::Session.login(username, password)


class PageViews
  extend Garb::Model
  
  metrics :pageviews
  # this could be :day, :month, :year
  dimensions :month
end

profile = Garb::Management::Profile.all.detect {|p| p.web_property_id == ua}

SCHEDULER.every '1m', :first_in => 0 do
  views = PageViews.results(
    profile,
	  :limit => 1,
    :start_date => Date.new(Time.now.year,Time.now.month,1).to_time
  )
  send_event('page_views',   { current: views.first.pageviews })
end

Putting passwords in code like this is super bad news. I'd recommend the OAuth workflow described here: https://github.com/vigetlabs/garb/wiki/OAuth-Session

I agree @davefp but the OAuth sessions with Google are overly complicated

Another option: replace hard-coded password with an environment variable. e.g.

# google password
password = ENV['GA_PASSWORD']

Still not great because a user's password has to be stored somewhere, but not as bad if you create a "service account" not tied to a human.

Yep, I agree with @davefp... putting passwords in your code is bad. This is why the instructions are to create a secondary account for this specific purpose that has access to view your stats.

If anyone is interested in doing this with OAuth, check out the Google Analytics Website Visitor Count Widget by @mtowers. In the client.execute call in the scheduler, you just have to replace 'metrics' => 'ga:visitors', with 'metrics' => 'ga:pageviews',.

Another option is using Google Analytics' Superproxy. https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/google-analytics-super-proxy