Page View using Google Analytics

If you track your site's page view using Google Analytics, this plugin can pull the page view information from your Google Analytics profile and add a page_view attribute to each article and page in your Pelican site. See few live examples here.

• http://jhshi.me
• http://leemengtaiwan.github.io

Requirements and Setup

First, follow the instructions here to set up Google API service account.

Then in Google Analytics, add the email address you created above as an user so that we can access the Google Anaytics API. Also make sure you have enabled Analytics API access for the newly created project.

At this point, you should have:

• Google API service email: <prioject_id>-<unique_id>@developer.gserviceaccount.com
• Google private key file: client_private.p12. Save this file somewhere secure. If you put this file in a Git repository, don't forget to add it to .gitignore.

Finally, install the Google API Python library:

$ pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client

You may also need other dependencies specified in requirements.txt. To install all the dependencies at once, use:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Settings

You need to provide the following information in your Pelican configuration file for this plugin to communicate with the Google Analytics API.

• GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT: the service email.
• GOOGLE_KEY_FILE: path to the private key file, E.g. ./client_private.p12.
• GA_START_DATE: start date to count page view. E.g., 2005-01-01.
• GA_END_DATE: end date to count page view. E.g., today.
• GA_METRIC: counting metrics, default is ga:pageviews. See other options here. Right now we only support query with ONE metric.
• POPULAR_POST_START: start date to count popular page views. E.g., A month ago.

With this plugin installed, each article and page object has two extra attributes:

• pageview: total number of page views between GA_START_DATE and GA_END_DATE.
• popular_pageview: total number of page view between POPULAR_POST_START and GA_END_DATE.

And there is one global context named total_page_view, which is the total page view of the entire site. You may want to show the number at page like index.html:

<div class="page_view">
The total number of page views of this site is {{ total_page_view }}.
</div>

Note

If you encounter this error while building:

NotImplementedError: PKCS12 format is not supported by the PyCrypto library.

Try convert the p12 file to pem file:

$ openssl pkcs12 -in client_private.p12 -nodes -nocerts > client_private.pem

The password should be notasecret.

Then set GOOGLE_KEY_FILE to be the pem file just generated.

Resources

• Google Analytics Core Reporting API
• Google Analytics Query Explorer