Here is my first experiment in integrating Google Analytics and jQuery Mobile. I've been trying to get this working off and on the last week or so, but I finally figured out my mistake this morning. Please consider this a proof of concept. It seems to be working ok now, but I bet there are about ten different ways to do this better. That being said - let's look at the code.
First, here is the page without any analytics code at all.
<div data-role="page"> <div data-role="header"> <h1>Home</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <ul data-role="listview" data-inset="true"> <li data-role="list-divider">Options</li> <li><a href="products.html">Products</a></li> <li><a href="members.html">Members</a></li> <li><a href="#about">About</a></li> </ul> </div> <div data-role="footer"> <h4>Page Footer</h4> </div> </div> <div data-role="page" id="about"> <div data-role="header"> <h1>About</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <p> This is demo content. </p> </div> <div data-role="footer"> <h4>Page Footer</h4> </div> </div> </body> </html><!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Analytics Demo</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a4.1/jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.css" /> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.2.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a4.1/jquery.mobile-1.0a4.1.min.js"></script> </head> <body>
It's a simple page with 3 links. As you can see, the About page is included in the same source, and products and members are separate pages. As they are very similar, I'll show one of them:
<div data-role="header"> <h1>Products</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <ul data-role="listview" data-inset="true"> <div data-role="footer"> <h4>Page Footer</h4> </div> </div><div data-role="page">
<li><a href="apples.html">Apples</a></li>
<li><a href="oranges.html">Oranges</a></li>
<li><a href="cherries.html">Cherries</a></li>
</ul> </div>
This page leads to 3 more - all of which are the same except for their names. Here is apples.html:
<div data-role="header"> <h1>Apples</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <p> This is for apples. </p> </div> <div data-role="footer"> <h4>Page Footer</h4> </div> </div><div data-role="page">
Ok - so now to the analytics. I knew I was going to use asynchronous tracking which is described in Google's docs here: Tracking Site Activity. This involves placing the core tracking code in the head of your document. So in my initial file I did so:
var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-70863-15']); _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); })(); </script><script type="text/javascript">
Now for the tricky part - and the part I screwed up on. According to the docs, I needed to make use of trackPageview, a function that allows you to asynchronously register a page view event. jQuery Mobile fires an event when pages are loaded. I made use of that event to wrap a call to trackPageview:
$("div").live("pagebeforeshow",function(event,ui) { var header = $("div[data-role='header'] h1",$(this)); var title = $.trim(header.text()); modtitle = "/" + title + ".html"; console.log(modtitle); _gaq.push(["_trackPageview",modtitle]); });
What this code does is listen for the pagebeforeshow event. This is one of many events you can listen to. (More information on events may be found in the docs.) When a page is shown, I use jQuery to grab the text out of the header. If you look at the page example above, you can see I include a title there that represents the page. With that I create a URL of the form: "/" + title + ".html." Here is where I screwed up. See the push event? It takes an array. My eyes missed that the first 10 times I looked at the code. Simply add [ and ] around the arguments seemed to fix everything:
Any comments on this technique? You can see the full code here: http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/demos/gajqm/ Although obviously you won't be able to view my analytics.