How to Enable Google Analytics Tracking on Documents

When publishing dashboards for large audiences or frequent clients, it's often helpful to collect detailed usage data such as first visits, pages viewed, and edits to dashboards. This will help you learn about how audiences or users interact with your Displayr document(s). Google Analytics is a powerful platform that can collect and analyze the type of data collected from both View and Edit modes in Displayr.

This article shows you how to enable Google Analytics tracking on individual documents or for your entire Displayr account. It is focused on setting up the connection for tracking between Google Analytics and Displayr only. You should reference Google Analytics support material for all other information regarding permissions and reporting. Our support team cannot help with working with or interpreting the data collected in Google Analytics, as it is well outside of our expertise.

Requirements

• Using this feature assumes you have an understanding of how to do reporting in Google Analytics.
  • If you've never used Google Analytics before, see Structure your Analytics account for an overview. It can be helpful to think of each Property being its own database, and a Data Stream to be a feed of information being written to the database. Dashboard names and other dashboard-specific info can all come through the same Data Stream.
• A Google Analytics account: Go to Get Started with Analytics to learn how to create an account.
• A Google Analytics "G-" ID: A "G-" ID corresponds to an individual Data Stream on a Property in your Google Analytics account. See Set up Analytics for a website and/or app to learn more about how to create a specific Account/Property/Data Stream (if needed) to get the "G-" ID.
  • If security permissions need to be different for certain dashboards, you will need to create additional accounts within Google Analytics to set permissions on the data collected in each.
  • If wanting to report separately on dashboards, you should either:
    • Create a Property with a Data Stream for each group of dashboards you want to be separate within your Google Analytics account. This Data Stream/"G-"ID will be used for all dashboards in that group. Do not add more than 1 Data Stream connection to a Property.
    • Or create a filter in Google Analytics to apply to your reports run on a Property that will filter in the specific Dashboards you are interested in.
  • When creating the Data Stream in Google Analytics, the Website URL and Name are for identification purposes only and do not affect anything with the tracking. You can use https://[app,yourregion,yoursubdomain,etc].displayr.com if you'd like.
• A Displayr account with Administrator access.
• Knowledge of events collected by Google Analytics will be helpful in interpreting the outputs. Click here to learn more about the specific events collected.

Methods

You can add your Google Analytics ID in either the Account Settings, the Document Settings ,  or both. If you add a "G-" ID to the Account Settings, that will be the default ID for all documents in the account, and you can create reports in Google Analytics across all documents.

Sometimes, you may want to track an individual document or set of documents separately (i.e., if they belong to an individual client). In that case, if you add a "G-" ID to those Documents through their Document Settings, Google Analytics will separate their data from the others so you can run reports that will only contain those select Documents. 

Setting the Default "G-" ID in Account Settings

1. Click the initials icon in the upper-right corner of Displayr.
2. Select Account settings > Settings
3. Enter your Google Analytics ID
   
    

This ID will be used by every document owned in this Displayr account by default. If individual Documents have other G-IDs listed, these will not be overwritten.

Adding the "G-" ID to the Document Settings

1. Click Document Settings > Document Settings to the right of your document name.
2. Select Properties > Google Analytics ID
3. Enter your Google Analytics ID
   

This will override the default ID set in the Account Settings, but is only used on this particular document(s).

Additional Details

Google Analytics collects similar data to the Dashboard Usage Statistics within Displayr. However, Google Analytics can't collect user name, email, or company information, though it offers a more powerful interface to analyze the data.

Please note that if a user is viewing a page anonymously (such as when you publish your document with Anyone with the link), then each device or web browser used to visit any document will be represented as a separate user, and will count as a separate "first_visit" event. 

The terminology between Google Analytics and Displayr is slightly different and has been outlined below for clarity:

Event properties in Google Analytics of note:

• View Tab events > tab property is the Displayr Dashboard page name.
• viewMode is whether the event took place in edit or view mode.

Next

How to Track Dashboard Usage Statistics in Displayr

How to Access Your Account Settings

How to Manage Documents in Displayr

How to Publish a Document as a Web Page (Dashboard)