Frequently Asked Questions

Why track events on the server rather than with JavaScript?

One big advantage is that privacy sensitive information such as IP addresses can be anonymized before they are sent to Google or other providers. This also allows tracking events that are only known to the server such as sales data or server side errors.

If I anonymize IP addresses, won’t I lose precision in location data?

Anonymizing IP addresses will definitely lose precision for IP geolocation. However, by zeroing the last 2 bytes as this library does, IP geolocation should still work to a major city or metro area.

How is this different from other packages like pyga, django-analytical, etc.?

Libraries like django-analytical ease the creation of JavaScript tracking tags and don’t do server side analytics like this library. Pyga uses the old gajs Google Analytics tracking rather than the more modern, documented, and supported measurement protocol.