Question

For my Grails application I want to set up Google Analytics to track only “partial” url’s. I ‘ll explain:

• a typical Grails url consists of the following parts: domain + application-name + controller + action + id
• e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/myapp/controller/action/12345

As far as I understand for Google Analytics the page to be tracked is identified by the entire url. For my purpose I’m not interested in the id part of the url: I want to know which actions have been performed, but I need not know for which id the action was executed.

And of course I would like a generic solution, because I have multiple controllers and multiple actions… Maybe some kind of filter stating “I want to track pages 3 levels deep (/myapp/controller/action)” would do? Or a filter stating “exclude everything from url after the last /”?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Pieter

Answer 1

I think this question is best answered by this article.

As the other contributors suggested, I too thought the issue should be resolved in Google Analytics. I clicked around a bit and got hopelessly confused.

Solving the issue within Grails is much much easier. In short the answer is:

• in the Google Analytics tracking javascript there is a
  “_trackpageview” action
• this action can take as parameter the url you want to track
• in Grails I can simply add the stuff I want to track:
  application/controller/action
• my Google Analytics script is in my main template
• I just use: _gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’,’myapp/${controllerName}/${actionName}’]);
• (“myapp” should be the name of your application)
• (${controllerName} and ${actionName} are generically available
  variables in the Grails views)

Hope this will help others.

Thnx for the other answers.