I just got my Flic in the mail and was really impressed with the possibilities it has to connect the offline world with the digital world. I originally bought it to try out a couple app ideas, and quickly realized how I could easily integrate it with Google Analytics.

In this post we’ll use the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol to send an event using Flic and look at how we could apply this concept in real life.

1. Create a hit with the measurement protocol

If you’ve never used the measurement protocol, it essentially allows developers to measure how users interact with their business from almost any environment. This means you can easily tie offline to online behavior. This is huge because it allows you to use Google Analytics not only for websites and apps, but other devices like a Flic button.

The easiest way to create a hit using the measurement protocol is by using their hit builder. In this example, I’m going to show you how to send an event with Google Analytics, so we’ll be working with the event category (ec), event action (ea) and event label (el) parameters.

To save some time, I’ve created an example hit that you can use for this excercise by going to the following URL: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/hit-builder/?v=1&t=event&tid=UA-XXXXXXXX-X&cid=e171b8f3-a8ee-4923-90cb-46ae46067ee5&ec=flic&ea=click&el=label.

Once you’re there, replace the UA-XXXXXXXX-X with your Google Analytics profile ID as shown in the screenshot below.

Once you’ve done that, scroll up a little bit on the hit builder and click Validate Hit.

Once the hit is validated, click Copy hit payload. This will copy the hit to your clipboard.

2. Create the hit URL

Now that you have the hit copied to your clipboard, we’ll want to create the full URL that we’ll load using our Flic.

Append the hit from your clipboard to ‘https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?’ so the final URL looks like this:
https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=event&tid=UA-XXXXXXXX-x&cid=e171b8f3-a8ee-4923-90cb-46ae46067ee5&ec=flic&ea=click&el=label

Email this URL to yourself so you can copy and paste it from your phone or tablet into the Flic app.

3. Create the action in your Flic app

Open your Flic app and create a new HTTP Request action for your Flic. Copy and paste the URL from your email in the previous step into the URL field in the Flic app. Select the Show resonse to No. Select Add at the top right and you’re all set!

Go to your Real-Time Events report and you should see the event come in at real time.

If you’re interested in tracking the double click or hold actions, just change the event action parameter in your URL and add them to the actions in your Flic app.

Use case: measure employee satisfaction

Recently, I’ve been to a couple places where they had HappyOrNot buttons where consumers can press to share their mood or satisfaction. This got me to think how I could use this at my office. Just go ahead and purchase 4 Flics and you can build your own! Change the event label to the person’s mood for each Flic and you’re all set.

Do you have offices across the globe? No problem, because the event will also log the city it was sent from. So you’ll be able to see what employee satisfaction is like from all over the world in real time.

 

Do you have other use cases for integrating Google Analytics and Flic? Share it in the comments. You can also purchase your Flic here.