How do you integrate Universal Analytics in to Chrome Extensions?

Question

The chrome extension guide has a tutorial for the old analytics install: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/tut_analytics.html

The instructions just say to link to the https version and update the manifest to allow loading scripts from that URL. So those should still apply to the new version. And in fact I can see the script loading from the server.

Once the script loads analytics does not properly initialize it self and never processes it's internal queue (ga.f) to send those events to the server. There is no error in the console. It's just quietly does nothing.

My guess is that the new Universal Analytics is just not set up to run in the the extension environment but the universal docs make no mention of that: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/

does anyone know if it's even possible to add Universal Analytics to an extension yet and when that might be added?

Answer 1

There's an issue for that on Google code: The solution is to pass analytics your own protocol check function or simply null for no checking, in an official way.

This has to come after ga('create', ...) :

ga('set', 'checkProtocolTask', null); // Disable file protocol checking. 

So you don't need to modify the original analytics.js script. Just include the standard tracking code snippet (dont' forget to add the "https:" prefix) and add "https://www.google-analytics.com" to your Content Security Policy.

A note to ayal gelles' solution: It is not necessary to add chrome-extension://... to the Content Security Policy since it's already included in the 'self' statement. Also, instead of loading the script via hardcoded URL you should use chrome.runtime.getURL("path/to/analytics.js"). This way you don't need to know your extension's ID, Chrome will fill it in for you.