Add support Enhanced Link Attribution

This looks not functional in Drupal. :-(

I cannot find any link in my D7 that has an ID defined nor any useful element with an ID 3 levels up. Without an ID defined the feature is pointless and does not work at all. This is a no-brainer feature to me as it is not common to add an ID to a link. We have been encouraged over years to use css classes only and leave the IDs behind in every element for flexibility reasons.

How?

So how can we add the code to enable this feature?

From my reading of the docs it only needs "an element" with an ID within 3 levels of DOM parent levels of the clicked element, which (unlike "A" tag IDs) I think is quite often to be the found on typical Drupal sites/links, for example blocks, nodes, views often include div IDs etc.

The example at https://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&utm_id=ad&answe... uses an "a" tag as the example, but the text says "Checks the ID of the click-target element, and if not found, climbs the DOM up to 3 levels to find an element with an ID;" - this makes sense to me, since part of the purpose of this is to track "clickable things" other than just "a" tags.

Reopening to take another look at this.

We can add it, but I still only have IDs on node forms. This is in my case 5-6 levels or more away from my links. This may be theme related partly, but by default this feature need to be disabled and we need to add a clear message that IDs are not very common.

Here is an initial patch for 7.x-1.x to support this new functionality. Would be keen for a few people to test this, and see a) if it works, b) does it break anything.

I believe this option should be disabled by default, as it does require a user to manually change something in their GA profile in order to see the statistics. This should maybe be in the description of the checkbox.

Added a description to the form noting that the feature needs to be enabled in GA. Didn't test actual tracking though.

I also added a preprocess function which will add sequential numeric IDs to all links, but it occurred to me that is probably a bad approach, since the IDs will change over time and GA may start tracking different links are the same. Rather, if we do add an ID I think it would need to incorporate the "right amount" of context in the ID, which I think is a hard problem. My suggestion would be to leave out this chunk and we can see how this performs using block/node IDs.

We are never using l() in translatable strings.

I think this feature is definitely worth adding. @hass your site may not easily make use of this feature, but that doesn't mean someone else's Drupal site can't.

+++ b/googleanalytics.admin.incundefined
@@ -188,6 +188,12 @@ function googleanalytics_admin_settings_form($form_state) {
+    '#default_value' => variable_get('googleanalytics_tracklinkid', 0),

in D7 you don't need to provide a default for variable gets anymore, the default will be NULL.

+++ b/googleanalytics.moduleundefined
@@ -228,6 +228,14 @@ function googleanalytics_page_alter(&$page) {
+    if (variable_get('googleanalytics_tracklinkid', 0) === 1) {

then you can simplify this to just if (variable_get('googleanalytics_tracklinkid')) { ...

+++ b/googleanalytics.moduleundefined
@@ -416,6 +424,20 @@ function googleanalytics_preprocess_search_results(&$variables) {
+ * Implements hook_preprocess_link().
+ *
+ * If "Enhanced Link Attribution" is enabled, adds a unique ID to links if one
+ * is not already present.
+ */
+function googleanalytics_preprocess_link(&$variables) {
+  static $count = 0;
+  if (variable_get('googleanalytics_tracklinkid', 0) === 1 && empty($variables['options']['attributes']['id'])) {
+    $variables['options']['attributes']['id'] = 'link' . $count;
+    $count++;
+  }
+}

I don't like this approach at all.

Lets leave the site's html alone, enabling this feature does not require this. If you notice your additional link information is not sufficient, we can put this in an example in README.TXT or something.

But we shouldn't assume this much about your site's html.

Does this do the following?:

Track which specific links are clicked on which specific page.

I'm asking because this seems like a basic link tracking need.

For instance, say you have the same 'buy now' button on every page. If you have multiple products, you would want to know from what page that 'buy now' button was clicked from.

These patches implement google analytics' enhanced link tracking - which does what you're asking. So yes!

Cool! Thanks kscheirer.

I'm also not sure if I like the hook_preprocess_link() and removed it therefore. I think we can commit this for now.

Minor changes in capitalization.

Before committing this I'd like to optimize the setting description. We should explain what this checkbox does and not just telling people they need to enable it in their Google Accounts. This is not useful to understand what they get.

Please make a suggestion.

Perhaps add a link to google's docs on what the ELA feature does?

The patch is rtbc from me - again you don't need to give a 2nd parameter when doing a variable_get() anymore, but that's a pretty minor quibble.

As said, I'm fine with committing this once the "description" really explains what the checkbox does. The current text don't help inexperienced users.

There seems no upgrade path to Universal Analytics or has someone an idea how it looks like?

I edited the description. Didn't test the patch, but as comment 22 said he was fine with committing with a better description. This good enough?

Fixed patch from #24

Is there same patch for drupal 6? thank you

edit


Now, I am not sure if that is a good way but I simply took the needed code and put it inside the googleanalytics.module like so

$script = 'var _gaq = _gaq || [];';
$script .= 'var pluginUrl = "//www.google-analytics.com/plugins/ga/inpage_linkid.js";';
$script .= '_gaq.push(["_require", "inpage_linkid", pluginUrl]);';

The last two lines are needed according google tutrial https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2558867?hl=en&utm_id=ad

After clearing cache, the code looks ok, no script errors on page. GA works as usual but Inpage analytics, where this code should take an effect won't start. I get a message - problem loading. We could not find what is wrong with your setup. Please ty later. What could be wrong?

Seems to work fine. I patched 7.x-1.4 with patch in #26. No errors or anything.

Can we mark this RTBC and get it committed?

Here's the same changes for 2.x branch (using new analytics code).

Oops, missed the changes in install file. Here's the correct patch for 7.x-2.x branch.

30: enchanced-link-attribution-7.x-2.x-1833578.patch queued for re-testing.

30: enchanced-link-attribution-7.x-2.x-1833578.patch queued for re-testing.

Has anyone had any luck testing this?

Thanks to all who helped getting this done.

I committed it to all 7 and 8 branches. No backport to 6.x has been done as it is near end of life. If you need this upgrade Drupal Core, please.