Description
This Google Analytics Popular Posts plugin queries Google Analytics for pageview data for your site and uses an algorithm based on publish date and total number of pageviews to determine a weighted pageview score for a post.
Using this scoring mechanism, the plugin generates a list of the most popular posts for a given site. The list of popular posts can be displayed using the included “Google Analytics Popular Posts” widget.
This plugin is under active development. If you experience problems with this plugin, please file an issue on GitHub.
Installation
- Upload the plugin files to the
/wp-content/plugins/ga-popular-postsdirectory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
- Authenticate using your Google account via the Settings > GA Popular Posts page in the WordPress dashboard
- Review the settings, changing them as desired and click “Save changes”
FAQ
- How does this differ from other WordPress popular post plugins?
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The problem we found with many WordPress popular post plugins was the lack of data used in the algorithm. Our approach was first to pull as much data as possible into WordPress so we could develop a better algorithm.
- How do I configure this plugin?
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Installation instructions are available in the plugin documentation
- What data are you capturing?
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We’re currently calling and caching the
ga:pageviewsto the database for eachga:pagepathdimension. Values for the current day and previous are stored during each cron job. A post id is generated for eachga:pagepaththat corresponds to an actual post. - How do I query the data myself?
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The data is stored across two database tables. The first (
analyticbridge_pages) stores eachga:pagepathwith a unique id and corresponding post id (if it exists).The second table (
analyticbridge_metrics) relates apage_idto a metric & value over a start & end date.To query this data yourself, find the corresponding page_id from the pages table and select using it from the metrics table. This can be accomplished using joins.
Reviews
Great for what it says it does – GA & Popular posts!
It’s light and does what it says it does. Very good!
Thanks for the documentation, I tried setting it up myself first and phew, I got far but couldn’t have done it without the doc. With it it would have been a breeze from the start!
I’m giving this 5 stars for the potential. Please read FolioVisions suggestions in his review on longer stats storage time. I have a tiny site at https://poydalla.net and currently it basically shows my latest posts. If I could even get most popular posts from a week or two it would be so much better. At this stage, it ain’t really useful for me. But I trust in the potential, please do it!
I’ll be digging in the CSS and maybe more to enhance the outlook of the stats. It’s a bit too plain! Maybe later you could add options to the plugin interface? I’d like some images atleast! Thanks a lot.
I’d like to help, but I’m sadly no coder. Thanks for your hard work!
(Edit: 12.11.17. No updates in a LONG time, plugin stopped working properly, no response to support ticket. Seems like the development has been stopped.)
Great plugin, but needs improvements
We were not able to find any other plugin which would fetch the post hit counts from Google Analytics and store it in such way that it’s easy to associated for each post.
Couple of issue though:
1) Setup of Google API tokens misses any instructions, I had to use this guide to figure out how to set it up: https://www.drupal.org/node/2551873
2) Setup of Google API tokens is fragile. No way of reseting it if something goes wrong, I had to remove the “analyticbridge_access_token” wp_option by hand.
3) Drop down menus associtad with picking of “Property View ID” don’t reflect the actual property you select, but the value in the text field is correctly stored.
3) It was not working if there was some URL which couldn’t be translated to a post ID, I had to fix that, as the plugin was generating invalid SQL insert in that case.
4) Only works with data from last 2 days, we would like last 31 months.
5) This plugin could be a powerful replacement of the Jetpack Stats module. We would like to create a bridge, so that Jetpack compatible themes can use the data from this plugin rather than having to use Jetpack.
We would like to discuss these improvements with you!
Contributors & Developers
“Google Analytics Popular Posts” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Google Analytics Popular Posts” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.1.2
- Improvements to the login flow leading to fewer bugs
- Updated documentation after visual refreshes on Google.com
- Added documentation for some common problems
- Small code formatting cleanups
0.1.1
- Remove calls to function
of_get_option,largo_top_term,largo_hero_class,largo_has_categories_or_tags - Remove option to display thumbnails for posts
- Adds filter
abp-widget-posts-termto allow changing the word used for multiple posts. - Small code formatting cleanups
0.1.0
- Initial release