1 Creating account in Google Analytics

1. Login the Google Analytics using Google Account.

2. By default Website option will be selected

3. Under the section setting up your web property give the details of the website

4. In the website name give the name of the website you want to track

5. In the website URL, enter the URL of the site.

6. In liferay if you want to track the activities of a site (community) give the URL of the site.

7. Select the category of the industry and select the reporting time zone.

8. Give the account name in the field.

Note: If you want to track the activities of different sites, create different accounts for different sites. Then by clicking on the particular account we can view all the activities of that site.

Fig2.1: Account administration

9. Click on the Get Tracking Id button. It will redirect to a page where we can see the Tracking ID eg:UA-37377230-1

10. The tracking code will be displayed in the same page. This will be used if site is not developed using Liferay.

11. Adding the Analytics tracking code to your website is the key to getting your reports rolling. This is how Analytics and your website talk to one another and

Interpret information about visits to your site.

2 Configuring the Google Analytics Tracking ID in Liferay

Go to the control panel and select a particular site and go to the site setting of that particular site and from the right side section go to the Advanced section and in that click on the Analytics link will be redirected to a page where you can see the Google Analytics field place the tracking ID eg. UA-37377230-1 in that field.

Fig3.1.1: Deployment Diagram

All the pages of that site will have the Google analytics tracking code.

3.Standard features of Google Analytics

The standard features of Google Analytics which comes with Google Analytics are

Number of visits for site

Unique visitors

Page views

Pages/Visit

Average Visit Duration

Bounce Rate

%New Visits

We can get percentage of returning Visitor and Percentage of new visitors which helps us to calculate the performance of the site.

In the home tab we will have the My Dashboard.

My dashboard shows the most important web analytics metrics of our website in one page on one single dashboard

My dashboard we can have widgets and can display the statistics as

Metrics, pie chart, table and Timeline.

Fig4.1: Dashboard

To know all the standard features provided by Google Analytics we can explore the standard features under the overview, content and conversions section in the right pane.

4 Introduction to Goals

Goal: a page which a visitor reaches once they have completed an action

You define goals based on the purpose of your website and the actions

You want your visitors to take. Goals are often called conversions.

In one of the project the requirement is to track the comments, likes and dislikes of a article by using Google Analytics.

To track this we have used event tracking in Google Analytics.

For that on the onclick of the button we have to write the event tracking script which is similar to

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'likes', 'like', 'article name']);”

3.1.1 Syntax for event tracking script

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Event Category', 'Event Action', 'Event Label']);

In our example

Event Category---> likes

Event Action------> like

Event Label--------> article name

Article name we should get dynamically.

5 Analytics Report

• Page visits

Total monthly visits

Total monthly visits from Google search

Total monthly visits from Google ads

This section will move through a handful of basic reports for page visits.

Remember to set your date range to the last month of data prior to pulling your

Reports.

6 Creating a custom report

Goto the google analytics custom reporting tab.

Create a new Custom report by clicking on the new custom report tab as shown below

Fig 6.1: Custom Report creation

In the title give the name of the custom report

select the flat table type

In the dimensions add Event label and Event Action

In the Metrics add Total events

In the Filter select the appropriate Event category and Event Action.

Click save

Then the report will be displayed select current date or the date range from which you want the report and it will be displayed as below

Fig 6.2: Custom report for Likes and Dislikes of a Article

Another requirement is we have to track how many times the article is fully viewed

ie. How many times user have been redirected to the detailed page.

For that we have to write the event tracking script on the onload of that detailed page so that whenever the user is redirected to the detailed page the event count will increase.

Create a custom report similar to the likes report.

Fig 6.3: Custom Report for Page views

6.1 Code to be written in the Liferay Custom Portlet

Creating a account in Google Analytics generates Tracking ID and Tracking code

refer Account creation section above for this.

The tracking code to be included in the javascript of the jsp of that custom portlet

var _gaq = _gaq || [];

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-36598517-1']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {

var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

})();

</script>

Code for getting the tracking Id of a particular site when user interacts

UnicodeProperties typeSettingsProperties =

themeDisplay.getScopeGroup().getTypeSettingsProperties();

String googleAnalyticsId = typeSettingsProperties.getProperty("googleAnalyticsId");

Code for tracking the event which is written on the onclick of the likes and dislikes button

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'likes and dislikes', 'likes', 'Eventlabel']);

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'likes and dislikes', 'dislikes', 'Eventlabel']);

where Event label is the name of the article.

Liferay Portal Geeks

Search This Blog

Integrating Liferay with Google Analytics