jekyll-ga

A Jekyll plugin that downloads Google Analytics data and adds it to posts. The Google Analytics metric is added to each post's metadata and is accessible as post._ga. It can be printed in a template, or optionally, posts can be sorted based on the metric instead of the default reverse chronological order. This is useful for making a site that lists "most popular" content.

Installation

This plugin requires two Ruby gems:

$ sudo gem install chronic
$ sudo gem install google-api-client

Copy jekyll-ga.rb to a /_plugins/ directory in the root of your Jekyll site repository.

The jekyll-ga plugin is only tested to work with Jekyll 0.12.0 and Ruby 1.8.7, but it may work with other versions.

Set up a service account for the Google data API

• Go to https://code.google.com/apis/console/b/0/ and create a new project.
• Turn on the Analytics API and accept the terms of service
• Go to API Access on the left sidebar menu, create a new oauth 2.0 client ID, give your project a name, and click next.
• Select Application type: Service account, and click Create client ID
• note the private key's password. It will probably be notasecret unless Google changes something. You'll need to enter this value in your configuration settings.
• Download the private key. Save this file because you can only download it once. Copy it to the root of your Jekyll repository. Safety tip: To protect this file, add its file name to your .gitignore file and to the exclude list in your _config.yml file
• Note the Email address for the Service account. You'll need this for your configuration settings and in the next step.
• Log into Google Analytics and add the service account email address as a user of your Google Analytics profile: From a report page, Admin > select a profile > Users > New User

Configuration

To configure jekyll-ga, you need to specify some information about your Google Analytics service account (as set up above) and your report settings.

Add the following block to your Jekyll site's _config.yml file:

jekyll_ga:
  service_account_email:    # service account email address
  key_file: privatekey.p12  # service account private key file
  key_secret: notasecret    # service account private key's password
  profileID: ga:####        # profile ID 
  start: last month         # Beginning of report
  end: now                  # End of report
  metric: ga:pageviews      # Metric code
  segment:                  # optional
  filters:                  # optional
  sort: true                # Sort posts by this metric

service_account_email, key_file, and key_secret come from the Google API console when you set up your service account.

profileID is the specific report profile from which you want to pull data. Find it by going to the report page in Google Analytics. Look at the URL. It will look something like https://www.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=en&pli=1#report/visitors-overview/###########p######/. The number after the p at the end of the URL is your profileID.

The start and end indicate the time range of data you want to query. They are parsed using Ruby's Chronic gem, so you can include relative or absolute dates, such as now, yesterday, last month, 2 weeks ago. See Chronic's documentation for more options.

The metric value is what you want to measure from your Google Analytics data. Usually this will be ga:pageviews or ga:visits, but it can be any metric available in Google Analytics. Specify only one. See the Google Analytics Query Explorer to experiment with different metrics. (Your dimension should always be ga:pagePath)

The segment and filters keys are optional parameters for your query. See the Google Analytics Query Explorer for a description of how to use them, or just leave them out.

The sort key can be true or false. If true, your posts will be sorted first by your Google Analytics metic, then chronologically as is the default. If false or not specified, your posts will sort as usual.

Advanced sorting

This plugin compliments Jekyll-Sort, so you can use your Google Analytics metric with a Jekyll-Sort rule by adding the following to _config.yml:

jekyll_ga:
  sort: false
jekyll_sort:
  - src: posts
    by: _ga
    direction: down
    dest: posts_popular

This allows you to have your site sorted normally (by reverse chronology) and also have a special site.posts_popular list of posts sorted by the specificed Google Analytics metric.