Gumshoe

An analytics and event tracking sleuth.

Background

Companies of all sizes are heavily dependent upon analytics to improve the user experience and forecast varying business data points. Gilt has leveraged Google Analytics (henceforth known as GA) heavily, utilizing the data redirection feature of GA. At some point in late 2015, that feature will be no more. Gumshoe was built to fill that void and to extend upon the data-collection abilities of GA.

Browser Support

Gumshoe supports the latest versions of:

Chrome

Firefox

Safari

And versions 8 - Latest of Internet Explorer. Sorry, but Gumshoe will not be supporting other OldIE versions.

Structure

Gumshoe is comprised of several simple sturctural elements:

dist contains the compiled gumshoe files meant for distribution and use in the browser. Comes in minified and unminified flavors.

examples contains small examples of working with Gumshoe.

lib contains third party libraries bundled with Gumshoe which facilitate standardized and privately scoped functionality for each gumshoe instance.

src contains the source for the Gumshoe library itself.

test contains mocha BDD tests

Project Goals

• Parity with Google Analytics base page data
• Organized event names and data
• High level of data integrity and confidence
• Low page footprint
• Low failure and miss rate

Base Concepts

Transport

Transports describe the way in which data is sent from Gumshoe to an endpoint where it is ultimately stored and/or analyized. Each implementation of Gumshoe is responsible for initializing its own transport. Once data for an event has been collected and the event has been queued, Gumshoe will attempt to send the data using the defined transport. Gumshoe also supports multiple transports for sending data to multiple endpoints.

Event Name

An event name should be carefully considered, and all event names should be of the same format, tense, and general structure. At Gilt we use a dot-delimited event naming notation. eg. 'checkout.country.selected'.

Event Data

Event data can be anything, of any type, that you or your organization decide upon. At Gilt, all event data is serialized to a string using JSON.stringify. Event data should be chosen carefully, should be documented and should not change in structure for a particular event, if time-over-time reporting is a priority.

Testing

npm install
gulp test

To independently test the distribution version of Gumshoe, run:

gulp test-dist

Contributing

Please fork the project and submit a pull request for all bugfixes, patches, or suggested improvements for Gumshoe.

Please take into consideration our formatting style when submitting pull requests. Pull requests which don't follow our simple style guide won't be accepted.

• Indentation is 2 spaces, no tabs.
• var blocks should be separated by newlines.
• Strings should be single-quoted
• Logical and functional blocks should have a newline after the opening brace or paren, and before the closing brace or paren.

Support

Please post support requests and bugs to the Github Issues page for this project.