I'm trying to add the asynchronous version of the Google Analytics tracking code to a website.
I'd like to keep the JavaScript in a separate file, and call it from there.
Here's what I've currently got in my .js file:
function addLoadEvent(func) {
var oldonload = window.onload;
if (typeof window.onload != 'function') {
window.onload = func;
} else {
window.onload = function() {
oldonload();
func();
}
}
}
function loadtracking() {
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
}
addLoadEvent(loadtracking);
And here's what I've got in the <head>
tag of my Master page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/google-analytics.js" ></script>
However, there's obviously a problem as after a few days, I'm not getting stats through!
Any ideas what I need to change?
Thanks, Neil
EDIT: Ok... After some feedback below, I'm going to add the new current contents of my .js file. I'll keep it updated so that if/when this gets solved, it will hopefully help other people trying to do similar things.
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
function loadtracking() {
window._gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-X']);
window._gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
}
loadtracking();
You completely miss the point of the asynchronous tracking code. Don't put it in an external file because that's exactly like including the old synchronous GA.
And most importantly don't defer the tracking code to
window.onload
as it may fire too late.If you use the asynchronous GA just put it in the top of you document in an inline script tag. This is the recommendation on Google Analytics website as well.
Honestly I have not read through all these posts since they are rather old. However I recently had the need to add Gtag (google tag manager for analytics tracking) to an old website that was a 1000 static HTML files and (LUCKILY) a the html files had a single include js file for the spry menu bar, like i said very old site! For my purposes I wasn't worried about performance but measuring the traffic so we can migrate it. your case may be different but the below code will work for external js includes of Gtag.
I used this file to load the code below since the above code is for legacy ga.js
Your variable definition
var _gaq
is inside a function. That means it's locally scoped inside that function and won't exist globally. Google Analytics depends on the global variable_gaq
. If you want to keep it inside a function like that, reference it aswindow._gaq
.