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Google Analytics in Sharepoint
Posted by on 2011-11-15
Google Analytics is a popular and mature tool for monitoring network activities on your site. Why not use it in Sharepoint? Dave Coleman and Mike Knowles provide good guides for doing that. There is a promising plugin to SP SPGoogleAnalytics which integrates both and provides an easy interface to put GA to your SharePoint installation and see the data directly on your intranet. It comes from codeplex:
What do you think about spgoogleanalytics.codeplex? When I recently had to turn on Google Analytics on an intranet, I had no time for evaluating SPGoogleAnalytics, so I did the harder way: just put ga script in the end of a master page, just before ending </body> tag.
But what if one has multiple masterpages? Is there a way to put GA in one step? Maybe a user control like Knowles suggests?
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I wouldn’t use it simply because SharePoint 2010 include extensive tracking, reporting and analytics features of its own that can also track internal data that google analytics would be unaware of. Google analytics also doesn’t work exceptionally well on secured internal traffic.
If you have to use google analytics, you could wrap it into a user control, just be aware that if you disable the feature used to deploy the web part, you will need to gracefully handle disabling it. Knowles implementation is less than ideal because it doesn’t allow for centralized, granular administration. Here’s some rules for that type of implementation:
-Create a web part or user control to deploy the script with optional parameters configured on the web level, preferably per site
-Embed the control into the master page
-Deploy the web part in the same solution and feature as the master page you’re using; pseudo-stapling
-Create an application page to customize two property bag properties representing the tracking account qualifiers and a bool “enabled property” that administrators can configure (i.e. bool isEnabled = Web.AllProperties[“GoogleAnalyticsIsEnabled”];). It’s also a good idea to make this page site collection level so you can manage all subwebs at once and provide a simple interface for doing so. This allows you to individually choose which sites google analytics does and does not track on a granular basis from within SharePoint.
(Note: if GA loses track of the user as they jump around the site collection and enter an untracked site, it may register false entries, dual hits, or incorrect paths in its logic. Using SharePoint statistics avoids this)
-Create a feature receiver that automatically handles installing and retracting the property bag properties when the feature is retracted.
Whilst SharePoint Standard 2010 provides analytics, we found it very high level. Our Internal Communications team was constantly complaining there was no in-page analytics, the statistics were too generic and there was no geographical information, no meaningful dashboards and generally a very unappealing look and feel. Google Analytics provides low level comprehensive reporting couple with engaging dashboards, you would probably page vast amounts of money for an equivalent off the shelf solution.
Btw, check this article: http://www.harepoint.com/Articles/GoogleAnalyticsSharePoint.aspx
WBR, Aleksandr
Thank you for the link.