Using the measurement protocol with Node.js: The universal-analytics package

[jo...@mouse3k.com]

Hi there,

after getting access to Universal Analytics and the Measurement Protocol last week we began thinking about how to best test it. We are currently developing a web app which on the server side uses Node.js. It is pretty much login-only, so using the protocol and the user tracking ID to track across device boundaries makes perfect sense.

So, as a first step, I created a node module called "universal-analytics" to initiate tracking from within Node.js on the server. 

It is available on NPM and Github if you want to have a look: 

https://npmjs.org/package/universal-analytics

https://github.com/jtillmann/universal-analytics

Let me know if you have any feedback and suggestions! I'm looking forward to it.

Obviously, a numer of tracking features (social, exception, custom, etc.) are still missing, so I will be adding to it in the next weeks!

Cheers, Jörg

(I hope this is not the wrong place to tell you guys about this)

[Nick Mihailovski]

Nice Jorg,

Can you share how doing the tracking server side has helped you over doing the measurement client side?

Also I'm curious, did you try the analytics.js JS library?

-Nick

[jo...@mouse3k.com]

Hi Nick,

we are just getting started, so all I can tell you are first experiences. When I say in the intro of the module that no client-side tracking is necessary, I don't mean to say we have entirely shifted to the server side. 

Our current approach is using a mixture of analytics.js for the frontend and the node module for server-side information relating to billing, sent emails, etc. Tracking something as simple as a pageview or a click on a button on the server side is rather difficult, so we plan to keep that in the browser. Server-side tracking helps us with things happening outside of the user's direct control. 

I'll keep you posted on our experiences :)