Avoid loading piwik.php when only tracking some links

Support & Bugs
1

We have a situation where we want to track only certain links with Piwik. (Not entire page.)

We have done this so far by using piwikTracker.trackPageView(); on links with a certain class.

This method works for us, but every time the page is invoked piwik.php loads which causes unnecessary load on our web server. 95% of the time none of our links are clicked (we have an affiliate widget on another large site).

Is there any way we can run Piwik.getTracker(… only when a link is clicked? How do you verify that the tracker have loaded, and how do you make it safe in an asynchronous JS environment. Thanks for the input!

2

For your use case, what about this?

  • don’t use tracker.enableLinkTracking() or trackPageView()
  • instead, call tracker.addListener( clickable_element )

Let’s say your page contains:


<a href="http://example.com/link" class="trackthis">Track This Link</a>
<a href="http://example.org/link" class="trackthis">And this one</a>
<a href="http://example.net/link">But not this one</a>

For async JS (with jquery), you could use something like:


$('.trackthis').each( function( index, element ) {
  _paq.push( ['addListener', element] );
});
3

Hi vipsoft! Thank you for the feedback.

We are currently not using .enableLinkTracking() or trackPageView();
We have commented those lines out of the tracking code.

I am worried about the following line in the tracking code:


var piwikTracker = Piwik.getTracker(pkBaseURL + "piwik.php", 4);

Is the PHP file loaded automatically (thus creating load on the Piwik install) or only when a tracking method is invoked? (Regardless of which tracking method) As I said we are on a very high traffic site and do not wish to cause unnecessary load on our Piwik isntall when only 1% of the sites visitors click any of our links.

4

getTracker just instantiates an object. There’s no piwik.php request until one of the track*() methods is called.