Ahoy

🔥 Simple, powerful visit tracking for Rails

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

You get:

• traffic source - referrer, referring domain, landing page, search keyword
• location - country, region, and city
• technology - browser, OS, and device type
• utm parameters - source, medium, term, content, campaign

See which campaigns generate the most revenue effortlessly.

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

🌱 To track events like page views, check out Ahoy Events.

✉️ To track emails, check out Ahoy Email.

Installation

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.

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 %>

The Power

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

Users

Ahoy automatically attaches the current_user to the current_visit.

If you define your own current_user method, be sure to add it to ActionController::Base, not ApplicationController.

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 and !current_visit.user
  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

UTM Parameters

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

or

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

Location

Ahoy uses Geocoder for IP-based geocoding.

Multiple Subdomains

To track visits across multiple subdomains, add this before the javascript files.

var ahoy = {"domain": "yourdomain.com"};

Development

Ahoy is built with developers in mind. You can run the following code in your browser’s console.

Force a new visit

ahoy.reset(); // then reload the page

Log messages

ahoy.debug();

Turn off logging

ahoy.debug(false);

Native Apps [experimental]

When a user launches the app, create a visit. Send a POST request to /ahoy/visits with:

• platform - iOS, Android, etc.
• app_version - 1.0.0
• os_version - 7.0.6
• visitor_token - if you have one

The endpoint will return a JSON response like:

{
  "visit_token": "8tx2ziymkwa1WlppnkqxyaBaRlXrEQ3K",
  "visitor_token": "hYBIV0rBfrIUAiArWweiECt4N9pyiygN"
}

Send the visit token in the Ahoy-Visit header for all requests.

After 4 hours, create another visit and use the updated visit token.

More

• Excludes bots
• Degrades gracefully when cookies are disabled
• Don’t need a field? Just remove it from the migration
• Visits are 4 hours by default

Reference

Use a different model

Ahoy.visit_model = UserVisit

Change the platform on the web

var ahoy = {"platform": "Mobile Web"}

TODO

• track emails
• simple dashboard
• hook to store additional fields
• turn off modules

History

View the changelog

Contributing

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

• Report bugs
• Fix bugs and submit pull requests
• Write, clarify, or fix documentation
• Suggest or add new features