Managing Google Analytics     

Getting to know your users and measuring user behavior is an important step in App Development. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of non-standard work to get Google Analytics to work after wrapping your mobile app with Cordova. Setting up Google Analytics in a pure web application is quite easy, but Cordova somehow prevents pageviews and events from being sent to Google Analytics.

Follow this guide to implement Google Analytics into your Cordova powered Quasar App.

IMPORTANT
You’ll need to include a <script> tag provided by Google in /src/index.template.html, which will make your App depend on an Internet connection!

Prerequisites

Preparation

Before we can start implementing Google Analytics into your application, you’ll need an account for Google Analytics and Google Tagmanager. So let’s do that first. When you have these accounts, it’s time to configure Tag manager. Follow the steps in this Multiminds article to do so.

Implementing this into application

For this guide, we’ll assume you have a fixed sessionId that you send to Google Analytics. Google Analytics uses a sessionId to distinguish different users from each other. If you want to create an anonymous sessionId, see Analytics Documentation on user id.

Place the Tag Manager snippet into head of your index.html file (if you’ve followed the Multiminds article, you already have this.) Create a new file in your codebase called analytics.js with the following contents:

export default {
  logEvent(category, action, label, sessionId = null) {
    dataLayer.push({
      'appEventCategory': category,
      'appEventAction': action,
      'appEventLabel': label,
      'sessionId': sessionId
    })
    dataLayer.push({ 'event': 'appEvent' })
  },

  logPage(path, name, sessionId = null) {
    dataLayer.push({
      'screenPath': path,
      'screenName': name,
      'sessionId': sessionId
    })
    dataLayer.push({ 'event': 'appScreenView' })
  }
}

To make sure all the pages in your application are automatically posted to Google Analytics, we create an app plugin:

$ quasar new plugin google-analytics

Then we edit the newly created file: /src/plugins/google-analytics:

import ga from 'analytics.js'

export default ({ router }) => {
  router.afterEach((to, from) => {
    ga.logPage(to.path, to.name, sessionId)
  })
}

Finally we register the app plugin in /quasar.conf.js. We can do so only for Cordova wrapped apps if we want:

plugins: [
  ctx.mode.cordova ? 'google-analytics' : ''
]

More information about events can be found in the Analytics documentation on events.

You’ll see the events and pageviews coming in when you run your app. It usually takes around 5 to 10 seconds for a pageview to be registered in the realtime view.

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Last updated: Sat May 19 2018
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