David Turnbull

Quick tweaks to improve Ahoy analytics data

#ruby_on_rails #analytics

Ahoy is a popular analytics gem that I use to track site visits and events in my Ruby on Rails apps.

The gem is well-documented, so I’m not going to walk through the setup here. But the quality of your analytics is only as good as the quality of your data – garbage in, garbage out – so I make a few tweaks to try and ensure the data is clean and usable.

Visits

Ahoy creates a visit when someone lands on your site. By default, visits are generated server-side, which can cause a few problems.

Controller actions

Some controller actions shouldn’t be recorded as visits at all. You can skip visit tracking in specific controllers by adding:

skip_before_action :track_ahoy_visit

Bot requests, disabled cookies

Server-side visit tracking can also lead to bot requests recorded as visits, or multiple visits recorded for users with cookies disabled.

You can avoid this by setting server_side_visitsto :when_needed, which defers visit tracking to JavaScript and only create visits server-side when they are needed by events.

# Add to your Ahoy inializer
Ahoy.server_side_visits = :when_needed

Active Storage hits

Serving images or files with Active Storage can also trigger Ahoy visits. You can prevent this by stripping cookies from these requests with the rack-strip-cookies gem:

Add to your Gemfile:

 gem 'rack-strip-cookies', '~> 2.0.0'

Then in application.rb:

# prevent ahoy from tracking visits on Active Storage calls
   config.middleware.insert_before(
    ActionDispatch::Cookies, 
    Rack::StripCookies, 
    paths: %w[
      /rails/active_storage/representations/proxy
      /rails/active_storage/blobs/proxy
    ]
  )

Events

Event names

While this isn’t really a ‘tweak’, I always make sure to follow a consistent naming system for my analytics events. This makes my dashboards and reports more intuitive, and avoids a mess of duplicates like ‘cart_created’, ‘CartCreated’, ‘created_cart’.

I like to follow the object–action framework: Project Created, User Invited, Article Updated, and so on. The naming convention doesn’t need to be clever, it just needs to be consistent and predictable.

Hi, I'm David Turnbull.

I’m an independent Ruby on Rails developer living in Sweden.

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