Implementing Google Universal Analytics Measurement Protocol in PHP and WordPress

19 thoughts on “Implementing Google Universal Analytics Measurement Protocol in PHP and WordPress”

1. This is a wonderful article, and thank you so much for the code examples! I’ve been looking for a solution to track PDF downloads from offsite links, and was going to start with the mod-rewrite + PHP-GA solution suggested here — http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/06/04/tracking-pdfs-google-analytics-server-side/ — but had the same concern you did that PHP-GA hasn’t been updated in over a year. mod-rewrite will still be necessary for my need to intercept any requests for .PDF files, but a simplified version of your gaBuildHit code will certainly get me the rest of the way. I’ll let you know if/when it works.

   Reply

   1. Hi Will,

      Please do – would be great to know how you get on.

      Stu

      Reply

2. Well, that was easy. I wholesale took your functions and included them in my functions.php

   Then, in .htaccess,

   # Use PHP 5.3 by default (HostGator or other shared hosts might require this line)
   AddType application/x-httpd-php53 .php
   # If the user-agent string is NOT set by our PHP script…
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !GA_PDF_Downloader [NC]
   # … rewrite all requests for PDFs to our PHP script
   RewriteRule ^.+\.pdf$ /downloader\.php [L,NC]

   Created ‘downloader.php’ in doc_root so those PDF requests have something to go to.

   In downloader.php, I immediately set the content type header and pulled in the basics of wordpress

   header(‘Content-type: application/pdf’);
   /** Include the bootstrap for setting up WordPress environment */
   include(‘wordpress/wp-load.php’);

   // and then
   // Get filename from the previous request
   $filename = parse_url(urldecode($_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]), PHP_URL_PATH);
   $protocol = ((!empty($_SERVER[‘HTTPS’]) && $_SERVER[‘HTTPS’] != ‘off’) || $_SERVER[‘SERVER_PORT’] == 443) ? “https://” : “http://”;
   $url = $protocol.$_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’].$filename;

   //I’ll test to make sure its a PDF getting called eventually, but this is just a POC for now

   //set the UA so the rewrite rule doesn’t fire endlessly.
   $download_args = array( ‘user-agent’ => ‘GA_PDF_Downloader’,
   ‘httpversion’ => ‘1.1’ );

   //painful trial and error on how to get the file sent to the browser
   print wp_remote_retrieve_body(wp_remote_get($url, $download_args));

   // and now I fire off my GA request to track the PDF
   $ga_args = array(
   ‘title’ => ‘Tracked PDF’,
   ‘slug’ => $filename
   );
   gaBuildHit( ‘pageview’, $ga_args);
   exit;
   //since the wp_http does everything as non-blocking calls, explicitly wanted to exit the script

   And my early tests show tracked PDF downloads, even from direct, offsite hits! Lots of cleanup and further testing to do, but I’ve had people complaining about GA not showing deeplinked stuff forever.

   All of the sloppiness is mine, but the important guts are all you + Alex Moore for the core idea of running this through apache rewrite rules —
   http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/06/04/tracking-pdfs-google-analytics-server-side/

   Thanks!

   Reply

   1. That’s great – thanks for sharing, Will. Glad the code helped!

      Reply

   2. Stu, great article. This was a real help to me and my team.

      Reply

3. Thank you very much for the code example 🙂

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4. Can it be that something is wrong with code because all e-commerce payments are shown that come from direct source. But that cant be 🙁

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   1. I guess there is nothing wrong with the code above. It is just missing the referrer, campaign source, medium and keyword. Check for more info on that.

      I have another question about that. Do you need to send this information once with the transaction or do need to add it to the items as well? Maybe somebody already has some insights on that?!

      Reply

      1. Hi Tilo,

         I’m on holiday at the moment with little access to internet, so your comments have been held in a queue – sorry about that. I’ll have a look at your comments when I return at the end of August – hope you get it working in the meantime!

         Reply

      2. I need to submit the data with the referrer by myself? How could I know? I thought Google will trace back the referrer by given CID. This is meaningless because all my submitted data are shown as from direct source. Please assist. Thanks.

         Reply

         1. Hi – sorry, I don’t have the time to look further into this right now as I’m pretty busy. Hopefully someone else can help here.

            Reply

5. Thank you for sharing you code example. It really helps me building up the e-commerce tracking with the help of universal analytics and the measurement protocol.

   I have one question though regarding multiple items per transaction. Can you combine all items and send them at once or do you have to send as many hits as you have items.

   As I’m writing these lines I’m leaning more and more towards the second option. Maybe you can confirm that?

   You say:
   “Please note – if you have multiple line items, my code doesn’t accommodate that as we only ever have one. You’ll need to amend the code to loop over the items and send them all.”

   Google says:
   “To send ecommerce data, send one transaction hit to represent an entire transaction, then send an item hit for each item in the transaction. The transaction ID ti links all the hits together to represent the entire purchase.”

   Again thanks a lot!

   Reply
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7. I found that the cURL was slowing down responses too much, particularly on transactions with multiple items, when several calls are made. I post directly through a socket, so I can close it immediately without waiting for a response. Now it takes a few milliseconds instead of a few seconds:
   
&$val)
{
$post_params[] = $key . '=' . urlencode($val);
}
$post_string = implode('&', $post_params);

   // get URL segments
$parts = parse_url($url);

   // workout port and open socket
$port = isset($parts['port']) ? $parts['port'] : 80;
$success = $fp = fsockopen($parts['host'], $port, $errno, $errstr, 30);
if($fp) {
// create output string
$output = "POST " . $parts['path'] . " HTTP/1.1\r\n";
if(is_string($ua)) $output .= "User-Agent: " . $ua . "\r\n";
$output .= "Host: " . $parts['host'] . "\r\n";
$output .= "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n";
$output .= "Content-Length: " . strlen($post_string) . "\r\n";
$output .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
$output .= isset($post_string) ? $post_string : '';

   // send output to $url handle
$success = fwrite($fp, $output);
fclose($fp);
}
return $success ? true : false;
}


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8. That’s odd – the previous post cut off the first lines of the code block – here they are:
   
function socketPost($url, $params = array(), $ua = null)
{
// create POST string
$post_params = array();
foreach ($params as $key => &$val)
....


   Reply

9. Another thing that caused a aggravating bug: our e-commerce engine (Magento) returns item quantity as a decimal (eg. 2.000), which breaks the Measurement Protocol ‘item’ hit, which apparently requires an integer to parse correctly. Item posts just weren’t showing up, even though all the parameters seemed correct and present. Casting to an int fixed it.

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10. Pingback: Google Analytics Measurement Protocol for Subscriptions | My Monkey Do

11. Hi Stu,

    This is a helpful article for me, I really appreciate you efforts 🙂

    Reply

12. Thank you a lot for your code examples, I’ve been banging my head on the desk about it too 😉
    Just one thing about using split in your gaParseCookie function : it’s an obsolete function, use explode instead 😉

    Source : http://php.net/manual/fr/function.split.php

    Reply