Configure Trackers

One of fundamentals of Metricalp is Trackers. You need to have at least one Tracker to use app. You may have unlimited Trackers. Every tracker has an unique tid a.k.a Tracker ID. You are going to use this tid to integrate your website with Metricalp. You can use one tid for multiple websites or you can use one tid for one website. It is totally up to you. This is a feature specific to Metricalp in the market. We are removing borders of trackers. For example you have 3 marketing websites, 2 e-commerce websites and 1 blog website. You can create 6 different trackers or you can create one for all or you can create one for marketing websites, one for e-commerce websites and one for blog website. Again, it is totally up to you. This feature will help you to manage your dashboards and data.

If you newly registered to app, you will be redirected to Create New Tracker screen automatically. If you already have at least one tracker, you can create new tracker with + button next to your current tracker name

Even you create new Tracker or edit existing one, you will see same tracker form. Let's look this tracker form fields.

The first field is tracker name. Pick a name which defines your trackers scope to you and your teammates. Like `Marketing Website` or `Customer 1 Websites`

The second field is timezone. It determines data query ranges based on selected timezone in dashboard. For example when you select "Today" as date range, it will be based on that selected timezone. Let say you are living on New York but selected Berlin timezone, then in dashboard Today means today in Berlin. So, unique count of visitors will be shown from day start of Berlin to day end of Berlin. For preventing confuses, you will see current time in selected timezone always right top of your dashboard.

The other field is allow data from all hostnames. This is another important field. If you select this toggle on, then any hostname (a.k.a any website) can use your tid and send event to your tracker dashboard. If you want to limit this (for example someone mistakenly used your tid in a website and you want to block it), toggle off this option. Then it will ask for allowed hostnames. You can add multiple hostnames.

The next field is Access. In Metricalp you can share you dashboard with others. Defaultly, access setting is private, that means only you can see your dashboard. But you have 2 more options as access setting. Public and Key. If you select Public, you will have an public URL for your dashboard. You can share this URL with your friends. Anyone has this link can see your dashboard and visitors data. If you select Key, you need to set a secret key (a.k.a password) for your shared dashboard. Then you can share your dashboard URL with your friends again but this time they need to enter also this secret key. So, you can share your dashboard with your teammates securely.

Then the next section for setting `Custom Prop Aliases`.

In Metricalp, you may have custom events and/or custom props. Custom prop means attached field to any event. For example you may have a `screen_view` event and you can attach authentication status info to this event as custom prop 1. You may have 5 custom props per event in a Tracker. We are planning to increase this number in future.

window.metricalp.event({
  type: "screen_view",
  custom_prop1: user.logged_in
});

But, while producing event and viewing it in dashboard, it can be hard to remember which custom prop keeps which data. To prevent this confusion, you can set aliases to per custom prop per event type. For example, if you set `logged_in` as alias for custom prop 1 in Tracker form for screen_view event type, then you will view that custom prop as logged_in in your dashboard. Also, after setting alias now you can produce events with this alias. For example, the above example will turn:

window.metricalp.event({
  type: "screen_view",
  logged_in: user.logged_in
});

Much cleaner right?

The beauty is prop aliases work event based. So, while you can set logged_in as alias for custom_prop1 on screen_view event, you can also set for example background_color as alias for custom_prop1 in click_save event. So, same custom prop can have different aliases for different events. You can customize in settings as you wish per event. Even you have set an alias for a custom prop, you can still continue to use custom_prop1 like syntax, too for any event.

The final setting in tracker form is `allow all custom events` section. When this toggle on, all custom events will be accepted. But you can off this toggle and set allowed custom events. Keep in mind that, screen_view is a system event and it is always accepted. You can specify which custom event types are accepted in this section when toggle is off for all.

After creating a Tracker, you can configure and update it from Tracker Settings screen. At left top, you can see and select current tracker to configure. It is same form with creation.

Only difference is there is also `Delete` button at the end of form which you can delete the tracker. You will lose data of tracker when you delete it, so be sure about you exported or you will not need that data in future.

Now we have properly configures tracker 🚀 Let's continue with embed and share settings of it