Rails plugin for Google Analytics and artificial inflation

Being the budding webmaster / blogger that I am, it comes natural to want to gather as much information about the traffic coming to my site. The obvious response to this is, duh, Google Analytics.

If you were to guess that someone has taken the effort to write a Rails plugin for Google Analytics, you’d be quite right. You can find out all about it here.

After using it a while, I started to notice that my hits seemed a bit artificially high. I thought about it a bit, and realized that it was probably caused by me, when I would log in, write a post, and generally make sure things are working.

I have a authorized? method that returns true if logged into a user, so ideally, I would skip adding the google magic when that’s true. Here’s the solution I came up with.

First, we want to skip the before_filter that the plugin adds. In app/controllers/application.rb, I add:

skip_after_filter :add_google_analytics_code

Now I create a new filter that will only do the google magic when viewed by a non-user.

after_filter :add_google_analytics_unless_authorized
def add_google_analytics_unless_authorized
  add_google_analytics_code unless authorized?
end

I also didn’t want stats collected for my user controller, like when I first try to login, so in app/controllers/users_controller.rb, I added:

skip_after_filter :add_google_analytics_unless_authorized

And that’s about all there is to it.