FriendsOfFlarum Analytics - tracking user visits

girefko

clarkwinkelmann You are right.. I was using Chrome all along and no matter what I did - the error would not go away. I then switched to Firefox and the error disappeared.

MikeJones

Does this work with Google Analytics 4 ?

luceos

MikeJones I honestly don't know, does it?

Gatsu

MikeJones For me doesnt work.
Have you solved it?

MikeJones

luceos So you are saying I should be the sacrificial lamb 😆

I can possibly try tomorrow morning at the start of the new month....

MikeJones

@luceos after some investigation it looks liek its close but not fully there. The Javascritp Google Analytics 4 gives is

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-personalCodeGoesHere"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'G-personalCodeGoesHere');
</script>

Looking at my own page source it looks like using this in the current state it is just missign this line:

gtag('config', 'G-personalCodeGoesHere');

No idea how much that one line matters... but may need to be added for this extension to work with the new Google Analytics 4.

MikeJones

Gatsu I think this extension needs to be updated. I added what I believe needs to be changed in my previous comment.

Just need someone from the FOF team to take a look and update.

Tobi

GA4 is not tracking, needs to be updated

MikeJones

Tobi mine looks like it's reporting. But I do believe updates are needed

davwheat

1.1.0

This extension should have supported GA4 out of the box, since none of the syntax used by this extension differs between UA and GA4.

If you have issues with page view reporting, make sure that your web data stream has Enhanced measurement enabled, and that Page views are configured with the Page changes based on browser history events option enabled.

Changes

Explicitly address GA4 compatibility
- Using GA4 will not manually report page views to Google Analytics, like was done for UA
- Please note, this means that instead of a page_path property on your page_view events, the full URL will be contained in the page_location property
Pass user IDs to Google Analytics for user-based tracking between devices, sessions and accounts

Updating

composer require fof/analytics:"*"
php flarum cache:clear

Checking configuration

If you use GA4, you can check everything is running smoothly by checking the DevTools network tab. This should show pings to collect?v=2&.... Clicking on one of these, then checking the Payload tab should show...

tid matching your G-... tracking ID
dl matching the page you visited
dr matching the page you just moved from
uid matching your Flarum user ID
...and various other tracking properties

jdoe

dumb question - but will this work for self hosted site with no public IP/DNS (behind NAT)?

clarkwinkelmann

jdoe the tracking happens entirely client-side. The way the website is hosted shouldn't matter. The current browser URL is the one that will be sent to Google Analytics or Matomo. The only IP address that matters here is the user IP which will be recorded automatically by Google or Matomo from the request it receives. Server never sends any request to Google or Matomo, and Google/Matomo never sends requests to Flarum either, so the forum hostname doesn't need to be reachable from the global internet.

If both Flarum and Matomo are used inside of a private intranet, Matomo will likely log the user IP from inside the intranet, depending on how you configured the Matomo server. If the analytics server is outside of the intranet, it will likely log the same public IP for all users inside the intranet.

jost

Hey - recently installed this and am using a google tag manager container to track a new GA4 property.
Everything working great.

However, I want to track certain events, like new user signups.

So I created a new tag manager event that fires on the URL containing "/confirm/AKFKHWDKH3GMDG62396NG" for example.

When the user gets the email, and follows the link, they land on a page with a big CONFIRM EMAIL button on it... and the URL contains /confirm.

Trying to record this as an event (close enough), BUT the google tag manager code is not being inserted on this "special" page.

Can we get this added?

Or maybe a better solution?

Anyone know of an extension where you can have brand new users land on a custom WELCOME landing page or something after they hit the email button?

clarkwinkelmann

jost it's true that this extension currently only adds the tracking script to the single page application, but Flarum doesn't use the single page application for password reset/change and a few other actions.

In the past the confirm endpoint used to be just an HTTP redirect but I think this was changed so the tracking code could theoretically be added.

Ideally this would require a change in Flarum itself to allow extensions to add to those pages, because currently the only option would be to override the HTML template of the entire page, which could create extension conflicts.

jost

Any other ideas on how to send tag manager an event when someone creates a new account?
Im so new to Flarum... I lack awareness of what may be available to take advantage of as a potential hook.

clarkwinkelmann

jost this extension only really implemented page change events, everything else would have to be custom made.

My Matomo extension implements a few more events and could serve as an example. There are events for the post composer but none for the login/signup modals at the moment, but it would work somewhat similarly https://github.com/flamarkt/matomo/blob/main/js/src/forum/index.ts

Biggest challenge with login/registration is that Flarum is performing a full page reload once completed so you would have to intercept the page reload and delay it until the tracking has been performed or you would miss some events depending on the network speed.

jost

clarkwinkelmann Biggest challenge with login/registration is that Flarum is performing a full page reload once completed so you would have to intercept the page reload and delay it until the tracking has been performed or you would miss some events depending on the network speed.

The simple solution would be for the Flarum team to add a ONE TIME alert, for the first time a user logs in after clicking on the link in the email that is sent.

A GTM flarum extension that provides numerous "hooks" everywhere would also be sweet 🙂

Or an extension that lands bran new users on a "Rules/TOS" page after they confirm. That would allow for a hook opportunity. Lots of small tweaks could solve this.

jost

Weeeeell... if the tag manager script isnt firing, there isnt anything I can do... but I can get CLOSE with a slick little known google tag manager trigger. A visibility trigger. Fires any time a selector enters the browsers view port.

When a user signs up and submits there username/pass/email we get an alert box in the middle of the screen that looks like this:

So I grabbed a selector from that yellow box area, and trigger the event when this selector "comes into view" and BOOM.... I snagged the event 🙂 Worked on the first try.

Now I can graph my approximate user signups on a trend chart in my executive dashboard 🙂
"Unconfirmed signups" - close enough. I mostly interested in the trends anyway.

Chihiro

Felt that the latest version could not be installed very well
It should be the latest version of Flarum, which is not compatible with it

clarkwinkelmann

Chihiro are you seeing any error message? Please share any error message and/or describe the unexpected behavior you observe.

Chihiro

clarkwinkelmann Installation failed. It is an error reported by the composer during installation.

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