I\'m trying to add the asynchronous version of the Google Analytics tracking code to a website.
I\'d like to keep the JavaScript in a separate file, and call it from
Honestly I have not read through all these posts since they are rather old. However I recently had the need to add Gtag (google tag manager for analytics tracking) to an old website that was a 1000 static HTML files and (LUCKILY) a the html files had a single include js file for the spry menu bar, like i said very old site! For my purposes I wasn't worried about performance but measuring the traffic so we can migrate it. your case may be different but the below code will work for external js includes of Gtag.
I used this file to load the code below since the above code is for legacy ga.js
//Added Google Anyltics Tag Container Tracking - included here to min rebuilding DOM
function loadGoogleAnalytics(){
var ga = document.createElement('script');
ga.type = 'text/javascript';
ga.async = true;
ga.src = 'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-XXXXXXXXX-X';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
}
loadGoogleAnalytics(); //Create the script
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-XXXXXXXXX-1');
//Confirmed with Google tag Assistant
You completely miss the point of the asynchronous tracking code. Don't put it in an external file because that's exactly like including the old synchronous GA.
And most importantly don't defer the tracking code to window.onload
as it may fire too late.
If you use the asynchronous GA just put it in the top of you document in an inline script tag. This is the recommendation on Google Analytics website as well.
Insert the asynchronous snippet at the bottom of the
<head>
section of your pages, after any other scripts your page or template might use.
Your variable definition var _gaq
is inside a function. That means it's locally scoped inside that function and won't exist globally. Google Analytics depends on the global variable _gaq
. If you want to keep it inside a function like that, reference it as window._gaq
.