Page feedback: support for Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

[chalin]

Universal Analytics (UA) is deprecated. For details, see #1096. Here's some of the code associated with the page feedback feature:

docsy/layouts/partials/feedback.html

Lines 37 to 53 in d9bf98b

	const sendFeedback = (value) => {
	if (typeof ga !== 'function') return;
	const args = {
	command: 'send',
	hitType: 'event',
	category: 'Helpful',
	action: 'click',
	label: window.location.pathname,
	value: value
	};
	ga(args.command, args.hitType, args.category, args.action, args.label, args.value);
	};
	yesButton.addEventListener('click', () => {
	yesResponse.classList.add('feedback--response__visible');
	disableButtons();
	sendFeedback(1);
	});

This still uses the analytics.js library's ga() function. Note that this code is incompatible with GA4 because of the library that is used and the event name, as is explained below.

Tasks

• Migrate from analytics.js to gtag.js - Use the gtag.js analytics library by default #1177
• Enable page feedback even without a Google analytics ID #1727
• Fix event emitting code that calls gtag - [GA4] Emit page_helpful events for page feedback #1726
  • Confirm that page_helpful events are being emitted, with a default value of 100 for "yes" and 0 for "no" responses:
    • For docsy.dev
    • For example.docsy.dev
• Add entry to the CHANGELOG
• Update the docs, Access the feedback data in particular - [GA4] Emit page_helpful events for page feedback #1726
• Add a comment to "Helpful" event not registering in GA4 #1426

---

Notes:

• Interestingly, Kubernetes docs had switched to using gtag.js in their override of layouts/partials/feedback.html already 4 years ago
• Indirectly related:
  • i18n of page feedback #175

/cc @caniszczyk @nate-double-u

[chalin]

Note: the use of click as a custom event name might not prevent projects from accessing page-feedback event data (I'm still exploring how to do this in GA4), but it does seem to make it unnecessarily harder when the same event name is also used by GA4 for another purpose.

[chalin]

In the interim, it seems that projects can define an event-modification rule through the analytics console interface, to change the event name of page-feedback events to, e.g., page_helpful from click. For extra details, see kubernetes/website#37657 (comment).

(Edit) Or projects could disable data-stream outbound clicks.

Thanks for the pointer to the relevant GA4 doc pages @emckean! 🧡

[jmichelgarcia]

Thank you for the pointers here, I just spent one hour trying to figure out this.