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I can't find anything recent on this. Is there any documentation on how to track with Google Analytics without using ga.js? I want a JS implementation on mobile devices but I don't want to load up 9KB of local memory or use server-side GA. I'm primarily interested only in tracking page views and uniques. Has anyone rolled their own GA implementation?

+1  A: 

You can track using just a gif file.

To use GA without javascript... do it by generating our own gif file and passing some information back to Google through our server. That is, we generate a gif, assign and track our own cookie, and then gather that information as you move through the site, and use a HTTP request with the appropriate query strings and pass it back to Google, which they then compile and treat as regular old analytics.

more here: http://blogs.walkerart.org/newmedia/2009/11/12/building-walkers-mobile-site-google-analytics-without-javascript-pt2/

adamwstl
Yeah! I saw that that was how Google suggested doing mobile tracking. The problem here is that our traffic is too high to risk doubling our dynamic page requests (especially for mobile devices that you can't easily modify once their deployed). I tried emulating the mobile tracking code in JS (using both the PHP and Perl scripts as a model), but I couldn't get any of my hits to register and gave up. My suspicion is that the cookie parameter was the problem, but I ran out of time and had to drop GA tracking in the end. I hope I can revisit this. Thanks for the answer, though.
Andrew