/backbone.analytics

A drop-in plugin that integrates Google's `trackEvent` directly into Backbone's `navigate` function.

Primary LanguageJavaScript

Backbone.Analytics

A drop-in plugin that integrates Google's trackEvent directly into Backbone's navigate function. Works best with pushState set to true. If pushState is turned off, it's possible Google will register visits twice on page load. You can mitigate that by removing the trackEvent from the Google code in your site.

Dependencies

Setup

Add the asynchronous Google Analytics code to your site.

If you run Backbone.history.start() with the silent: false option (it's the default) then you may want to remove the following line from your tracking snippet to prevent Google from possibly double counting the initial page load. _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Add these dependencies to your site's <head>, in order:

<script src="jquery.js"></script>
<script src="underscore.js"></script>
<script src="backbone.js"></script>
<script src="backbone.analytics.js"></script>

Usage

Anywhere you call your routers navigate method with the trigger option set to true Backbone.Analytics will call '_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/some-page'])' after completing the Backbone route. This pushes the route to the Google Analytics tracking queue. Once this queue is processed by the Google Analytics script your urls will be tracked to the Google Analytics server.

var TestRouter = Backbone.Router.extend({
  routes: {
    'some-page': 'somePage'
  },

  somePage: function() {
    // Perform your route based logic, e.g. Replace the current view with a different one.
    return false;
  }
});

var router = new TestRouter();
Backbone.history.start();

Somewhere else in your application, change the view by doing:

router.navigate('some-page', { trigger: true });

Anywhere in your application where you want to update the URL but do not trigger the associated route, you will still need to manually track the action.

Contributors