Ahoy

🔥 Simple, powerful visit tracking for Rails

Visits are stored in your database so you can easily combine them with other data.

You get:

See which campaigns generate the most revenue effortlessly.

Order.joins(:visit).group("utm_campaign").sum(:revenue)

How It Works

When someone visits your website, Ahoy creates a visit with lots of useful information.

Use the current_visit method to access it.

Explore your visits with queries like:

Visit.group(:search_keyword).count
Visit.group(:country).count
Visit.group(:referring_domain).count

Chartkick and Groupdate make it super easy to visualize the data.

<%= line_chart Visit.group_by_day(:created_at).count %>

This information is great on its own, but super powerful when combined with other models.

Let’s associate orders with visits.

class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
  visitable
end

When a visitor places an order, the visit_id column is automatically set.

🎉 Magic!

See where orders are coming from with simple joins:

Order.joins(:visit).group("referring_domain").count
Order.joins(:visit).group("city").count
Order.joins(:visit).group("device_type").count

Ahoy automatically attaches the current_user to the current_visit.

With Devise, it will attach the user even if he / she signs in after the visit starts.

With other authentication frameworks, add this to the end of your sign in method:

if current_visit
  current_visit.user ||= current_user
  current_visit.save!
end

To see the visits for a given user, create an association:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :visits
end

And use:

user = User.first
user.visits

Use UTM parameters to track campaigns. This is great for emails and social media. Just add them to your links and Ahoy will pick them up.

http://datakick.org/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=newsletter-2014-03

http://datakick.org/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=social&utm_source=tweet123

Ahoy uses Geocoder for IP-based geocoding.

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'ahoy_matey'

And run the generator. This creates a model to store visits.

rails generate ahoy:install
rake db:migrate

Lastly, include the javascript file in app/assets/javascripts/application.js after jQuery.

//= require jquery
//= require ahoy

We recommend using traditional analytics services like Google Analytics as well.

Everyone is encouraged to help improve this project. Here are a few ways you can help: