GoSquared – traffic monitoring

GoSquared provides both real-time traffic monitoring and and trends. It tells you what is currently happening at your website, what is popular, locate and identify visitors and track twitter.

Installation

To start using the GoSquared integration, you must have installed the django-analytical package and have added the analytical application to INSTALLED_APPS in your project settings.py file. See Installation and configuration for details.

Next you need to add the GoSquared template tag to your templates. This step is only needed if you are not using the generic analytical.* tags. If you are, skip to Configuration.

The GoSquared tracking code is inserted into templates using a template tag. Load the gosquared template tag library and insert the gosquared tag. Because every page that you want to track must have the tag, it is useful to add it to your base template. Insert the tag at the bottom of the HTML body:

{% load gosquared %}
...
{% gosquared %}
</body>
</html>

Configuration

When you set up a website to be tracked by GoSquared, it assigns the site a token. You can find the token on the Tracking Code tab of your website settings page. Set GOSQUARED_SITE_TOKEN in the project settings.py file:

GOSQUARED_SITE_TOKEN = 'XXX-XXXXXX-X'

If you do not set a site token, the tracking code will not be rendered.

Internal IP addresses

Usually you do not want to track clicks from your development or internal IP addresses. By default, if the tags detect that the client comes from any address in the GOSQUARED_INTERNAL_IPS setting, the tracking code is commented out. It takes the value of ANALYTICAL_INTERNAL_IPS by default (which in turn is INTERNAL_IPS by default). See Identifying authenticated users for important information about detecting the visitor IP address.

Identifying authenticated users

If your websites identifies visitors, you can pass this information on to GoSquared to display on the LiveStats dashboard. By default, the name of an authenticated user is passed to GoSquared automatically. See Identifying authenticated users.

You can also send the visitor identity yourself by adding either the gosquared_identity or the analytical_identity variable to the template context. If both variables are set, the former takes precedence. For example:

context = RequestContext({'gosquared_identity': identity})
return some_template.render(context)

If you can derive the identity from the HTTP request, you can also use a context processor that you add to the TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS list in settings.py:

def identify(request):
    try:
        return {'gosquared_identity': request.user.username}
    except AttributeError:
        return {}

Just remember that if you set the same context variable in the RequestContext constructor and in a context processor, the latter clobbers the former.

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Thanks go to GoSquared for their support with the development of this application.