Blog: Google Analytics

How To Get Detailed Metrics for Drupal Site Running on USB Drives

We recently put a disaster relief kit in the form of a Drupal website on a usb drive for the American Institute of Architects’ Communities by Design initiative (for details, see here, here, and here). As development proceeded, we got to discussing setting up the Drupal installation to “phone home” to get software updates and centralized backups. And if the installations were already phoning home, well, why not track how and where they are being used?

Using Google Analytics, we developed a tracking mechanism for each and every copy of Drupal on a stick. In this post I’ll describe how we did it.

We decided we wanted to track the stick’s usage – the application pages they visited and length of stay – whenever users were connected to the internet. Google Analytics fit the bill as the best means of tracking, but how would users call Google's javascripts? Google doesn't allow listing 127.0.0.1 or localhost as a domain for purposes of their tracking tools. We solved this problem by embedding an IFrame element in page.tpl.php of the application’s custom theme and listed its source a newly purchased domain. We'll use http://example.com for the purposes of this post so as to keep our tracking domain untainted with spider traffic.

Determining the Best Website Tracking Tool

Recently several of our clients have asked which is the better tool to track website traffic, Google Analytics or server logs. I love to see our clients becoming passionate about their statistics, so this is a fun question for me to tackle. Before you start going back and forth between which tracking system is superior, it’s important to understand that many of your options are fundamentally different (kind of like apples and oranges or cats and dogs).

The Short Answer: Google Analytics

For most smaller organizations, Google Analytics is the solution to pick. It’s comprehensive, easy to use, and it’s free. But it’s not perfect, and it won’t meet every organizations needs.

The Long Answer: It Depends on You