ga-popular-posts-geniem

A library for developers that provides a basic set of methods to fetch and use most popular posts from Google Analytics.

Due to the nature of how Google Analytics and it's API works, this is not a plug'n'play plugin. It takes a few steps to set up this up, so please be patient.

Setup

Google Analytics

1. Create a Google Analytics Project
2. Add Custom Dimensions, at least Post ID and Category
3. Create a new Content Group called Single Posts (to filter out front pages etc.)
4. Get the View ID from View Settings

Google Service (API for Analytics)

1. Create a new project throught Google Console https://console.developers.google.com/project
2. Activate Google Analytics API for this project
3. Create a new Service Account Key and save it
4. Copy the Service Account ID (which is an email address in style of oiuwer-3423@coherent-hearing-1098233.iam.gserviceaccount.com)
5. Add the Service Account ID to Google Analytics users and allow access to Read & Analyze

You now should have two things, View ID and the Service Account Key JSON file. You'll need these later.

Google Analytics Tracking Code on your website

You need to do some dynamic customisation in your tracking code to enable single post tracking (in Dustpress style):

<script>
    (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
                (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
            m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

    ga('create', 'XXXXXXXXX', 'auto');
{?Single}
    ga('set', 'contentGroup1', 'Single Posts');
    ga('set', 'dimension1', '{Single.Content.ID}');
    ga('set', 'dimension2', '{Single.Content.post_categories[0].slug}');
{/Single}
    ga('send', {
        hitType: 'pageview',
	{?Single}
		title: '{Single.Content.post_title|h}',
	{/Single}
		location: '{WP.permalink}'
    });

</script>

Now let the Google Analytics gather some traffic and then you can start fetching stuff.

Fetching the data from Google Analytics

/**
 * Get all single top posts
 */
function getAllSingleTopPosts()
{
    // Create the object
    $gaPopularPosts = new GAPopularPosts();

    // Set Google Service Credentials. This is the contents of the JSON file mentioned earlier
    $gaPopularPosts->setCredentials(GOOGLE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_CREDENTIALS);

    // Set View ID
    $gaPopularPosts->setViewId(GA_POPULAR_POSTS_VIEW_ID);

    // Set dimensions you want to get
    $gaPopularPosts->setDimensions(array(
        'ga:pageTitle',
        'ga:pagePath',
        'ga:dimension1'
    ));

    // Set filters for the query
    $gaPopularPosts->setFilters(array(
        'ga:contentGroup1' => 'Single Posts'
    ));

    // Set time range
    $gaPopularPosts->setTimeago('30daysago');

    // Get the report
    $report = $gaPopularPosts->getReport();

    // Save the report
    $cache_name = 'ga_all_top_posts';
    update_option($cache_name, $report);
}

After running this, you should have data in options table with the name set in the function, in this case ga_all_top_posts. You can get to this data by running $top_posts = get_option('ga_all_top_posts');.

If you want to filter the results by category, you replace the filter part with:

// Set filters for the query
$gaPopularPosts->setFilters(array(
    'ga:dimension2' => $category
));

You might want to run this in cronjob to keep the data up to date.

A good way to explore the API and test out filtering is here: http://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/explorer/