YJL

I had this idea in the end of September 2010 when I was playing with Google Analytics' tracking code. I wrote some code for rating blog posts using the option value, the code did stay on my blog for a day or two before I took it down, it wasn't too useful for me. But a function allows visitor to report page issue could be very helpful if someone is willing to click on some buttons.

I have finished a simple code and it's at bottom of this blog:


Well, it doesn't look pretty. Here is the code in that HTML/JavaScript gadget:

<script src="https://gist.github.com/raw/1713067/ga-wr.js"></script>
<script>
function init_page() {
  var gawr_options = {
    target: 'ga-wr',
    UA: 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X',
    report_options: [
      {
        title: 'Image is not loaded'
      },
      {
        title: 'Link is broken'
      },
      {
        title: 'Other'
      }
      ]
    };
  new GAWR(gawr_options);
}
$(init_page);
</script>
<div id="ga-wr"></div>

For report of issues report, I can write my own program to get daily report using my current daily report as base. But I don't think I will trouble myself, not yet anyway. Right now, I can see the report with custom report in Google Analytics:


It works great for me for now. Note that, you need to use Alert/Total Events instead of Pageviews. It's event not page. The report does get updated very quick, probably a few minutes after reported. I will say that's instant almost.

Now a little technical background of this script. Basically, you should use different profile. It will track page when a report is being submit and the report is recorded as Event. Event action is the issue name and option label is the additional information as you seen in the image above.

Option value can only accept integer, custom value probably can do the trick, but I put the data in option label. There is another way to record is to rewrite the page URL when tracking the page, but I don't like that. But this could be a benefit, rewriting url to be /original-page-url/issue and still send the event. This way, if you watch Real-time tab, you can see there is a report just comes in if you don't use separate profile.

And remember when visitor reports, page URL is recorded by page tracking, also user's browser and system and everything Google Analytics collects by default is already in the data. Isn't this awesome and brilliant? I don't even need to code for collecting such data if I need to check visitor's browser, they are just there for me to read.

Google Analytics API can do more than just website access statistics, you can set up a poll or some thing more. Imagine you let people to vote and you use visitors metric or something to prevent some degree of voting spam.

Only the data isn't public without coding and they require process.