How to count number of times a channel entry was viewed in frontend?

Question

Say I have a Channel calls "Products" that contain individual product information. Is there a way to set up EE so it can keep count of the number of times the product was viewed in the front end?

Answer 1

ExpressionEngine has 'view tracking' functionality, built into the system, that can be used. Be aware that it can cause a performance hit for heavy traffic sites.

If your site receives a lot of traffic, you may wish to turn off (disable) EE's tracking capabilities and use a third party add-on, such as Solspace's Tracker. Tracker has some intelligence involved, and tries to exclude traffic from bots and search engines.

Here's sample code for using EE's internal view_count

{exp:channel:entries channel="books" orderby="date" sort="desc" limit="1" track_views="one" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks"}


<h2 class="title">{title}</h2>
<p><b>Author</b>: {book_author}
<br /><b>Publisher</b>: {book_publisher}</p>

{book_review}

{/exp:channel:entries}

Just adding the track_views="one" to a single article/view page, will start the view count process. To display, the number of views or to just sort by popularity, you would then use view_count.

If you are using the Tracker Module, you would add the view count like so

{exp:channel:entries channel="books" orderby="date" sort="desc" limit="1" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks"}

{exp:tracker:track channel="books" entry_id="{entry_id}"}

<h2 class="title">{title}</h2>
<p><b>Author</b>: {book_author}
<br /><b>Publisher</b>: {book_publisher}</p>

{book_review}

{/exp:channel:entries}

Tracker, also provides an interface for looking at the data internally in the control panel.

This can be beneficial, when you want to see popularity, but don't want to display it on the front-end of the site.

Either way, don't forget to set-up one or two Google Analytic Dashboards. Dashboard Junkies create some of my favorite GA Dashboards. See this one for tracking sales, Dashboard 11: Sales Cockpit

You can add them to your Google Analytics account, to dive into your data, faster. As well as customize them to better suit your website. You probably want to add some data funnels as well, so you can see, if and when users drop out of the sales process.

Answer 2

ExpressionEngine does have an Entry “Views” Tracking Tag

However, it's probably better to use something like Google Analytics for this. The problem with counting views from server hits is it will include things like GoogleBot indexing your site, which isn't particularly helpful for telling which page is the most popular. I'm not aware of any plugins which can access the Google Analytics API to return the view count for a particular page, but it's certainly possible, so a plugin may exist, or you could create one.