Clear cache? Pull most recent posts from Google Analytics?

The reason I am asking is some of our URLs were messed up in Google Analytics (GA). But the actual real site URLs continued to work. But if you clicked on the GA versions of the URLs they go to 404 page. I assume Toplytics tests the GA URLs and if it is a 404 it does not include it?

Since discovering the issue, I have created an htaccess redirect for those URLs to their correct URLs on the website. When Toplytics now tests those URLs it should see them as working. Does that mean it will include them in its results?

Thanks,
Dean

Finally, can I set Toplytics to pull back results from a single category?

Hi Dean,

Can you please get everything tested with this version of Toplytics?

https://dl.presslabs.net/toplytics-v4.0.0.zip

It is still in beta testing and regarding your points I can tell you the following:

Caching – in this new version you’ll have the possibility to fetch again the data from GA. It is getting automatically refreshed every hour.

Messed up URL’s: can you please give us a more specific example of a wrong URL and a correct one? At this moment it’s unclear for me how this happened in GA. Were these links wrongly sent from the site?

As for limiting the posts to only a certain category: this is not yet implemented, but could be a new feature that we might add in the future.

Please let us know how it goes with version 4 of the plugin.

Thanks and best regards,
Pedro/Presslabs Support team

Hi,

Thank you for the clarifying questions. My first question after looking at a test page of top 25 results from timeframe “today” is that I do not see any of our URLs from our custom post type “special_report”. In Google Analytics (GA) we have several “special_report” URLs in the top 5. Does your plugin only check posts in the main Posts sections?

What is the code I use to add my custom post type to Toplytics results?

Thanks,
Dean

Hi Dean,

If you’ll be using v 4.0 which I shared in my previous reply, then you’ll have to go to Settings -> Toplytics -> Settings and add your custom post type in the “Allowed post types” list (by default only posts are added in the list). If you add this to your domain, you’ll get the direct link to the Toplytics settings:

/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=toplytics&tab=settings

Let us know if you have any additional questions.

Best regards,
Pedro/Presslabs Support team

Hi,

1. Since I wrote you I tried the code from this post:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/display-custom-post-type-2/

Added functions.php to try and force only ‘special_reports’ to show up:

add_filter( 'toplytics_allowed_post_types', 'toplytics_add_allowed_post_types' );
function toplytics_add_allowed_post_types( $allowed_post_types ) {
    $allowed_post_types = ['special_report'];
    return $allowed_post_types;
}

If this is correct, how do I include ‘post’ as well? Like this:

add_filter( 'toplytics_allowed_post_types', 'toplytics_add_allowed_post_types' );
function toplytics_add_allowed_post_types( $allowed_post_types ) {
    $allowed_post_types = ['special_report', 'post'];
    return $allowed_post_types;
}

2. And the weird URLs in GA came from a problem with a trailing slash after .php, like this
mydomain.com/special_report/mypost.php/

Which in GA shows up as this:
mydomain.com/special_report/mypost.php/index.php

Does your plugin compare the URLs in GA to the permalink URLs in the WP database?

Thanks,
Dean

Hi Pedro,

Apologies, emailed you the same time you emailed me. Testing your plugin now.

Thanks,
Dean

Hi again Dean,

Just to reply on your previous reply:

1. Yes, that code should work on the previous plugin version!

2. Yes, there is a matching done between the links from GA and what’s present in WordPress (and consequently the slug stored in the DB)

Looking forward to getting your confirmation for the new plugin version functioning!

Best regards,
Pedro/Presslabs Support Team

Hi Pedro,

Installed the v4.0 plugin and got this error:
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘?’ in /wp-content/plugins/toplytics/components/Frontend.php on line 240

Thanks,
Dean

Hi Dean,

This means that your site is still running on a very old version of php. This plugin is only compatible with PHP 7.0 and above. You should contact your host and request an upgrade of the PHP version (please be aware that outdated plugins or themes might break because of this).

If this is not an option, then you can continue to use v3.2 of the plugin which is still compatible with php 5.6 for example.

Best regards,
Pedro/Presslabs Support Team

Hi Pedro,

Thank you, we are upgrading to php 7.2 this weekend. I’ll follow up with v4.0 test results then.

Appreciate the help,
Dean

Hi Dean,

Just wanted to follow-up on this and ask if you managed to do the upgrade to php 7.2 and test v4.0 of our plugin.

Thanks and best regards,
Pedro/Presslabs Support Team

Hi Pedro,

Turns out our problem was with bad URLs in Google Analytics. Once we fixed those, then the correct URLs bubbled to the top and started showing correctly as top posts in your plugin.

We just finished our upgrade to php 7.2, but need to hold off a bit on testing your plugin in our live environment. I’ll ping you back once I can test in our dev environment. Thanks again, Dean

Hi Dean,

Thanks for your confirmation! I’ll then mark this thread as resolved and please get back here or start another thread for testing the new version of the plugin.

Best regards,
Pedro/Presslabs Support Team.