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Google Analytics Beacon Analytics

Sometimes it is impossible to embed the JavaScript tracking code provided by Google Analytics: the host page does not allow arbitrary JavaScript, and there is no Google Analytics integration. However, not all is lost! If you can embed a simple image (pixel tracker), then you can beacon data to Google Analytics. For a great, hands-on explanation of how this works, check out the following guides:

Can I use this production?

The ga-beacon.appspot.com instance is a demo instance, good for prototyping and proof of concepts. If you intend to use this in production for your application, you should deploy your own instance of this service, which will allow you to scale the service up and down to meet your capacity needs, introspect the logs, customize the code, and so on.

Deploying your own instance is trivial: fork this repo, modify the project name in app.yaml, and follow the normal GAE deploy instructions. You should be up and running in less than five minutes.

Setup instructions

First, log in to your Google Analytics account and set up a new property:

Next, add a tracking image to the pages you want to track:

Example tracker markup if you are using Markdown:

[![Analytics](https://ga-beacon.appspot.com/UA-XXXXX-X/welcome-page)](https://github.com/igrigorik/ga-beacon)

Or RDoc:

{<img src="https://ga-beacon.appspot.com/UA-XXXXX-X/welcome-page" />}[https://github.com/igrigorik/ga-beacon]

If you prefer, you can skip the badge and use a transparent pixel. To do so, simply append ?pixel to the image URL. There are also "flat" style variants available, which are available when appending ?flat or ?flat-gif to the image URL. And that's it, add the tracker image to the pages you want to track and then head to your Google Analytics account to see real-time and aggregated visit analytics for your projects!

You may also auto-calculate the tracking path based in the "referer" information of the image. To activate this simple add ?useReferer to the image URL (or &useReferer if you need to combine this with the ?pixel, ?flat or ?flat-gif parameter). Although they are some odd browsers that don't always send the referer header, the amount of traffic coming from those browsers is usually not relevant at all. Of course that if you need to measure the traffic from those odd browsers you should not use this method.

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