Tracking

A declarative way to add Google Tag Manager tracking data to your application. It supports multiple ways of sending analytics events by supporting event data inheritance and the possibility to send events with vanilla JavaScript without rendering/hydrating your React application.

Installation

$ yarn add @volvo-cars/tracking

useTracker

The simplest way of adding an event to GTM is by using the useTracker hook which returns a Tracker instance that exposes helpful methods that send different event types such as interaction or noninteraction. It sends these events by modifying the window.dataLayer global array. This array is watched for changes by GTM when embedded on a page, which means any pushes to this array will trigger a new GTM event.

In the above example, we send an interaction event and attach eventAction and eventLabel to it. Notice the event additions to window.dataLayer on each button click. It's also worth noticing how Tracker.interaction adds the event property automatically to each event. This is to distinguish between the types of events sent to GTM.

Arguments

useTracker takes 3 optional arguments. The first is an event data object that will be added to all events sent by the returned Tracker. The second is any Tracker options and the third is options?.ignoreIfEmptyContext which is used in conjunction with the TrackingProvider mentioned below, this will disable sending events if the hook is not wrapped with a parent TrackingProvider.

TrackingProvider

Simple

While useTracker works fine for simple cases, we sometimes want to send shared data between all events without needing to rewrite said data with every event we send. This can be done by passing the default data as props to TrackingProvider.

Notice how the events pushed to window.dataLayer in the above example include pageName and eventCategory.

Inheritance

TrackingProvider supports inheritance, meaning that for any data added to any of the parant TrackingProviders, all will be sent and not just the last in the tree.

In the above example, all event data from all TrackingProviders was sent with each event in that tree. Notice how eventCategory was overridden in the last TrackingProvider.

trackPageLoad

It's sometimes desired to send page load events without needing user input. This can be done by adding the trackPageLoad prop on any TrackingProvider in the tree.

() => {
  return (
    <TrackingProvider trackPageLoad pageType="pdp" pageName="xc40">
      <Block>...</Block>
    </TrackingProvider>
  );
};

forceLowerCase

All events are forced to be lowercase by default but it's also possible to disable this behaviour, based on specific requirements. This can be done with the forceLowerCase prop.

logging

We can enable logging of events in development with the logging prop on the TrackingProvider.

enableReactTracking

TrackingProvider can store information in data attributes. This allows us to push event tracking information in places where we don't want to hydrate/render our React application. A useful case is for static sites that don't need any user input except for sending tracking events. A useful usecase is the DotCom SiteFooter which is rendered using React server-side but does not render/hydrate client-side. This can be done by disabling the enableReactTracking prop on the TrackingProvider. A more detailed explanation can be found in the Dom Tracking.

Track

Allows any child element to attach tracking events to any event.

withTracker

This package also exports a HOC that helps with attaching tracking events based on domEvents

Dom Tracking

As mentioned earlier in the enableReactTracking section. TrackingProvider can store information in data attributes. This allows us to push event tracking information in places where we don't want to hydrate/render our React application.

To enable this, first set enableReactTracking to false on the TrackingProvider. This will generate the following html, notice the data-track-onclick attributes.

We then attach the tracking listeners with createDomTrackingListener.

import { createDomTrackingListener } from '@volvo-cars/tracking/domTracking';
document
  // first get the parent of the nested components which have tracking
  .getElementById('root')
  // attach the listener which will traverse up the tree to get all the
  // context data from parent `data` attributes
  ?.addEventListener('click', createDomTrackingListener('onClick'));

Caveats

When rendering the static content, and wanting to use the TrackingProvider passing custom react components will just pass in props with data. It's up to you to pass them down the line. It will only add them in two cases:

• Direct child is a simple dom element.
• Children is a fragment or multiple elements, in this case, the'll be wrappedj with div

Examples:

// this will add data attributes
// to the `main`
<TrackingProvider
  pageType="catch all"
  enableReactTracking={false}
>
  <main>
    {/* .... */}
  </main>
</TrackingProvider>
// this will wrap children
// with `div` containing data
<TrackingProvider
  pageType="catch all"
  enableReactTracking={false}
>
  {header}
  <main>
    {/* .... */}
  </main>
</TrackingProvider>
// this will pass down `data-track-context`
// to the `App` it's up to developer to handle this
<TrackingProvider
  pageType="catch all"
  enableReactTracking={false}
>
  <App />
</TrackingProvider>

Strict types

This package exports non-strict types for TrackingData and CustomDimension

export interface TrackingData extends Record<string, any> {}
export type CustomDimension = string;

Those types can be made stricter depending on your use case. To override those types you can create a declartions file in your types directory somewhere in your application and overide them as needed.

Example

import '@volvo-cars/tracking';
declare module '@volvo-cars/tracking' {
  export interface TrackingData {
    eventAction?: string;
    eventLabel?: string;
    eventCategory?: string;
  }
}

Web Vitals

You can measure Web Vitals metrics on real users, in a way that accurately matches how they're measured by Chrome and reported to other Google tools. This can be done in two ways depending on the use case:

Using Next.js

Starting from Next.js v10.0.0, you can export a reportWebVitals function from _app which helps provide Web Vital metrics:

import { reportWebVitals as webVitals } from '@volvo-cars/tracking/webVitals';
export function reportWebVitals(metrics: NextWebVitalsMetric) {
  return webVitals({
    metrics,
  });
}

This will report something like the following, depending on the metric dispatched by Next.js

      {
        event: 'noninteraction',
        eventAction: 'fcp',
        eventCategory: 'web vitals',
        eventLabel: 'uniqueid',
        eventValue: 2,
      },

Any additional event data can be sent using additionalEventData property:

import { reportWebVitals as webVitals } from '@volvo-cars/tracking/webVitals';
export function reportWebVitals(metrics: NextWebVitalsMetric) {
  return webVitals({
    metrics,
    additionalEventData: {
      pageName: 'my page name',
      pageType: 'my page type',
    },
  });
}

Custom App

If not using Next.js, Web Vitals can be reported and measured using measureWebVitals:

import { measureWebVitals } from '@volvo-cars/tracking/webVitals';
measureWebVitals();

API

Tracker

constructor(
    eventData?: TrackingData | null,
    {
      forceLowerCase = true,
      logging = false,
      disabled = false,
    }: TrackerOptions = {}
  )

useTracker

useTracker(
  hookData?: TrackingData | null,
  trackerOptions?: TrackerOptions,
  options?: { ignoreIfEmptyContext?: boolean }
): Tracker

returns a Tracker instance.

Props - TrackingProvider

Props - Track

withTracker

withTracker(
  Component: React.ComponentType,
  {
    event: 'onClick';
    defaultAction: string;
  });

returns a new React.ComponentType with tracking data attached.

createDomTrackingListener

createDomTrackingListener(eventName:string)

return a new event listener.