GA Beaccon code in Google Sheets stopped sending traffic data

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I have been using my Google Analytic Properties since 2016. (a couple of Google Sites and Google Sheets). This August all my Google Sheet properties have stopped stracing visitors' activity. Analytics says there is no traffic, but I can see there is a fairly big visitors activity (see screenshots attached).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1egM1io2HLLsppEdWwe2-gsmabZ-f942MChm1iWqYmHE/edit?usp=gmail

In my Sheets, since 2016, I have been using the GA Beacon code below: =image(getGABeacon("UA-57765892-4")&"?pixel"), - this is a white pixel in cell A59.

Inserted in the Sheets I have a script that worked fine for years.

In Analytics I set thd page below as a target to trace: https://ga-beacon.appspot.com/

The record of traffic in my Sheets has stopped on the 17th of August (I have no problem with my Google Sites, though).

I am not an expert, only a simple user, so I have no idea of what could went wrong.

Thank you in advance for your help. Joseph

beacon google-analytics-api google-analytics google-sheets analytics
1 Answers

I googled for ga-beacon.appspot.com - appspot.com is the domain for Google Cloud services (AppEngine instances), so I already suspected that this might not be a public service.

Indeed I found this github repo for ga-beacon, and the readme states:

Can I use this production?

The ga-beacon.appspot.com instance is a demo instance, good for prototyping and proof of concepts. If you intend to use this in production for your application, you should deploy your own instance of this service, which will allow you to scale the service up and down to meet your capacity needs, introspect the logs, customize the code, and so on.

I assume the developer shut the instance down after to many people failed to notice this and sent data to ga-beacon.appspot.com at their expense (they pointed out that there is no promise the service will be available).

So if you want to continue to use this, you would need to create your own instance on Google Cloud. As the readme says,

Deploying your own instance is trivial: fork this repo, modify the project name in app.yaml, and follow the normal GAE deploy instructions. You should be up and running in less than five minutes.

You probably will have to create a billing account, but GCP includes a generous free tier, so this should not be expensive to run.

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