Tracking offline event with Google Analytics

Question

I tried to track user activity in my site such as click or mouse over and different kind of events.... Is there any solution to track events even when users are working offline... Can I store them in something like cookie and send them to the server when find active internet connection?

Is that possible?

Thank you

Answer 1

Depends on what browser types you're targeting. Are these for HTML5 offline webapps?

If they support ononline and onoffline events, you can implement this yourself fairly trivially.

Some potentially workable code, using offline events, native JSON and HTML5 Local Storage:

if(!localStorage.getItem("offlineGA")){
  localStorage.setItem("offlineGA","[]");
}
var _ogaq = {
push : function(arr){
    if(navigator.onLine || !("onLine" in navigator)){ // if online or if browser doesn't support onLine/offLine detection.
        _gaq.push(arr);
    }
    else{
     var stored = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem("offlineGA"));
     stored.push(arr);
     localStorage.setItem("offlineGA", JSON.stringify(stored));
    }
}
};

$(window).bind("online", function(){ // if you don't have jQuery, you can do window.ononline instead
   _gaq.push( JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem("offlineGA")) );
   localStorage.setItem("offlineGA","[]"); //empty it
});

Then you would just use _ogaq as a wrapper for _gaq.

ie:

_ogaq.push(["_trackEvent","Category", "Action"]);

Answer 2

Another thing to consider is that the time that would get recorded would be the time the data was sent as opposed to collected locally on the device. Fortunately however there is now a way to avoid this being an issue using the measurement protocol and the qt parameter (queue time) it allows you to send the age of the event/view etc.. in milliseconds. I have tried this in the realtime viewer and it does show up at the time recorded as expected.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#qt

Realise it's an old question but it has been driving me bonkers this weekend.