On the Laravel News site there's a new post showing you how to make use of the Google Analytics API in your Laravel application to find trending content in your site (most accessed pages).
Here on Laravel News, I wanted to generate a list of the most popular posts for the past seven days and display the results from most popular to least popular. To solve this problem I thought of two solutions. The first is to build my own tracking system so I could keep a count and then use it for ordering. However, that could generate a huge amount of data and it seemed like a solution that an analytics tracking service could handle.
As I was fumbling through the Google Analytics API I found a Laravel Analytics package by Spatie.be that allows you to easily retrieve data from your Google Analytics account and it seemed like the best way to solve this problem. Let’s look at how I used it to generate a list of popular posts here on Laravel News.
They then walk you through the installation (via Composer) and configuration of the library. This includes linking to more information about setting up the credentials for the connection. They then show how to use it to fetch the most popular pages and what the response looks like as a collection. Finally they show you how to create a wrapper class you can easily reuse anywhere in your application to fetch and display this "trending" information". The post ends showing you how to create a "View Composer" that only fires when the view is being rendered, not on every request.
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