Bots are amazing, unless you're Google Analytics
After many months of learning to host my own Discord bot, I finally figured it out! I now have a node server running on my localhost that sends and receives data from my Discord server; it works great. I can do all kinds of the things I want to with my Discord bot.
Given that I work with analytics everyday, one project I want to figure out is how to send data to Google Analytics (specifically GA4) from this node server.
NOTE: I have had success in sending data to my Universal Analytics property. However, as awesome as that was to finally see pageviews coming into, it was equally heartbreaking to recall that Google will be getting rid of Universal Analytics in July of this year.
I have tried the following options:
GET/POST requests to the collect endpoint
This option presented itself as impossible from the get-go. In order to send a request to the collection endpoint, a client_id must be sent along with the request itself. And this client_id is something that must be generated using Google's client id algorithm. So, I can't just make one up.
If you consider this option possible, please let me know why.
Install googleapis npm package
At first, I thought I could just install the googleapis package and be ready to go, but that idea fell on its face immediately too. With this package, I can't send data to GA, I can only read with it.
Find and install a GTM npm package
There are GTM npm packages out there, but I quickly found out that they all require there to be a window object, which is something my node server would not have because it isn't a browser.
How I did this for Universal Analytics
My biggest goal is to do this without using Python, Java, C++ or any other low level languages. Because, that route would require me to learn new languages. Surely it's possible with NodeJS alone... no?
I eventually stumbled upon the idea of actually hosting a webpage as some sort of pseudo-proxy that would send data from the page to GA when accessed by something like a page scraper. It was simple. I created an HTML file that has Google Tag Manager installed on it, and all I had to do was use the puppeteer npm package.
It isn't perfect, but it works and I can use Google Tag Manager to handle and manipulate input, which is wonderful.
Unfortunately, this same method will not work for GA4 because GA4 automatically excludes all identified bot traffic automatically, and there is no way to turn that setting off. It is a very useful feature for GA4, giving it quite a bit more integrity than UA, and I'm not trying to get around that fact, but it is now the Bane of my entire goal.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9888366?hl=en
Where to go from here?
I'm nearly at the end of my wits on figuring this one out. So, either an npm package exists out there that I haven't found yet, or this is a futile project.
Does anyone have any experience in sending data from NodeJS to GA4? (or even GTM?) How did you do it?
...and this client_id is something that must be generated using Google's client id algorithm. So, I can't just make one up...
Why, of course you can. GA4 generates it pretty much the same as UA does. You don't need anything from google to do it.
Besides, instead of mimicking just requests to the collect endpoint, you may just wanna go the MP route right away: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4 The links #dockeryZ gave, work perfectly fine. Maybe try opening them in incognito, or in a different browser? Maybe you have a plugin blocking analytics urls.
Moreover, you don't really need to reinvent the bicycle. Node already has a few packages to send events to GA4, here's one looking good: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ga4-mp?activeTab=readme
Or you can just use gtag directly to send events. I see a lot of people doing it even on the front-end: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ga-gtag Gtag has a whole api not described in there. Here's more on gtag: https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/gtagjs/reference Note how the library allows you to set the client id there.
The only caveat there is that you'll have to track client ids and session ids manually. Shouldn't be too bad though. Oh, and you will have to redefine the concept of a pageview, I guess. Well, the obvious one is whenever people post in the chan that is different from the previous post in a session. Still, this will have to be defined in the code.
Don't worry about google's bot traffic detection. It's really primitive. Just make sure your useragent doesn't scream "bot" in it. Make something better up.
I'm have built an app that the user save package tracking numbers and then when tapping on them the app sends a request to the parcel provider and gets back the tracking info. Pretty simple.
What i want to do is to create a backend server that stores the user's tracking codes and checks them at regular intervals. When the status change then the user gets a push notification.
My thought is to use a Nodes.js server with a MongoDB database but i'm stuck how to implement the tracking code monitoring on the server. Should i use a timer? Is there a better/simpler approach for this?
Currently, I have figured out how to make API calls to YouTube Data Api and getting the number of likes of any video. And I'm making the call every minute. I do not know, however, how to update the corresponding element in html with the updated value.
Previously, I had made API calls in app.get and then updated using response.send() but that meant that my number would only update everytime I reload the page. Then I took the code block out of app.get but realised I had no way of update the UI with updated numbers from the API call.
I would like to ask how I can go about doing this. Thank you.
for that, you can use WebSocket module
Websocket is just a protocol like HTTP and it provides a persistent connection between a client and server that both parties can use to start sending data at any time.
Websocket is also provided by many front-end frameworks such as flutter, native android, react native etc.
Consider the following use-case:
Say I am making the socket request from the browser (consider socket object is available and status is connected):
So if you inspect in the developer tools of chrome/any browser, you will be able to observe something like below:
I was thinking there is a way to mask or send it in binary format how other messaging services are doing on web socket. I tried the following way to send masked/binary
But its showing again as below (it not masked/binary)
This is how it looks on the other messaging services.
I have tried to explore the full documentation on the socket.io npm module. But unfortunately did not find how to do this.
Can anyone put some light on this or any reference to the document link will be of great help.
**Updates**: I found this reference but not able to understand how it can be used on the library i.e. node module socket.io [Data Framing & Masking](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6455#section-5)
I read in an article that odata can be used for different combination of clients/servers.
Say I would like to develop a web application where i store data(say information about all mobile products on market) using mongoDB and use python as backend with Bottle framework to access data through browser as GET.
Then i decide to extend web app as android app. i can extend it to android without any code change on server side.
My doubt is does using odata here helps in any way? Say if i want to extend it to other clients?
Yes, you are right, you don't need to change even a single line of code on the server side if you change a client app. OData defines many conventions for the communications between the client and the server. such as:
What the URL looks like if you want to query some data
http://services.odata.org/V4/OData/OData.svc/Products?$filter=ID gt 2&$select=ID,Name,Rating,Price&$orderby=Price desc
Which http method should be used to Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete an entity
Generally speaking, Post for Create, Get for Retrieve, Patch/Put for Update, Delete for Delete.
What the payload looks like.
How to invoke a function/action
As long as the requests conform to these conventions, the server side always returns the predictable responsese regardless whether the clients is a browser or a mobile device.
I also find the examples for the odata:
https://aspnet.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#Samples/WebApi/OData/v4/ .
Hope this helps you.