Joomla is a Free and open CMS (Conetent management system). It’s one of the most popular CMS amongst WordPress, Drupal and many others.Since Joomla CMS has been downloaded 23 million times, there are fair chances that a lot of people who use a CMS might be using Joomla.
Implementing Google analytics with Joomla!
The purpose of this blog post is to make Joomla users understand the importance of Google Analytics implementation on Joomla websites. There are two ways you can implement Google Analytics on your Joomla enabled website.
- Manual implementation
- Using extensions
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- Manual implementation: When you are using a CMS, it becomes easy to manage and enhance features. In a non-CMS website, you have to add Google Analytics codes manually on each pages. In a Joomla website, you just have to paste the code to your main template page, and it gets added to all other pages of the website.
Steps
- Log-in to your Joomla account.
- Go to Template manager from Extension menu
- Select the default template, click edit. On the edit page, click Edit HTML.
- Paste your Google Analytics code in the <head> tag and click Save. It will add the code to all other pages of your website.
- Manual implementation: When you are using a CMS, it becomes easy to manage and enhance features. In a non-CMS website, you have to add Google Analytics codes manually on each pages. In a Joomla website, you just have to paste the code to your main template page, and it gets added to all other pages of the website.
- Using extensions: Extensions in Joomla are like add-ons. They are also called modules or plug-ins. Extensions are ready made features for your Joomla website. E.g., a Google plus extension adds Plus 1 button to your website with a few clicks. There are more than 7,400 extensions available on official Joomla! Extensions directory, and many more are available otherwise. From this huge list, there are a lot of extensions available for Google Analytics implementation.
Here are some of very popular Google Analytics extensions we found.
- J! Analytics
- OpenPotion
- Bigshot
- Asynchronous Google Analytics
- Google Analytics plugin for Joomla 1.6
- iBualoy Analytics
- WebGuru’s Google Analytics
- AS Google Analytics
Out of these extensions, we found the J! Analytics Extension cool, and it’s very popular amongst its competitors. It’s also available for the latest Joomla version, 1.6.
Here’s how you can install J! Analytics extension on your Joomla website.
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- Download the J! analytics extension from the Joomla Extensions directory.
- Log-in to your Joomla admin account.
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- From main menu, click Extensions > Install/Uninstall
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- Browse the file and install it.
You’ll see a notification once the installation is complete.
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- Go to Module Manager and click on J!Analytics to edit it.
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- Make necessary configuration changes as shown in the screenshot below.
On the right side of the same page, enter values as below.
Click Save once you’re done.
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- Done. This will paste Google Analytics code to all of your pages. Open any page of your website and see whether the code exists in the source.
It’s this easy to install Google Analytics code to your website. This was for J!Analytics. For other extensions mentioned above in the list, We recommend the automatic installation over manual code pasting. Why?
- For non-techie users, it’s the best option. Just a few clicks and settings, and over
- It’s likely to make mistakes while going the manual way
- These Extensions are free, why not use them?
Google Analytics Implementation for Joomla! VirtueMart
If you are running an e-store on your Joomla enabled website, most probably you are using VirtueMart as your Shopping Cart Application, and it must reflect in your Google Analytics profile properly. e.g., it should show revenue numbers for each product, and show how each product is performing.
It’s important to use an extension for e-commerce tracking while you are using Joomla with VirtueMart. Again, there are a lot of options available in the Extensions directory. We installed JAnalytics and these are the steps to follow.
- Download the J Analytics plugin from Extensions directory.
- From main menu, click Extensions > Plugin manager
- Go to plugin manager and click on “janalytics virturemart” to edit it.
- Follow step 6 from above example.
- Done. Now, open the order confirmation page source of any successful transaction look whether transaction details are being passed properly. Check the screenshot below.
Done. Isn’t it cool? If there were no plugins/extensions for Virtue mart, you might have to write scripts to capture the product details. Here’ you can implement it in moments without a techie.
One very important thing to note: When you install a plugin/extension for VirtueMart, don’t forget to disable any other Google Analytics plugin/extension you have installed. Otherwise, it will reflect duplicate visits in your Google Analytics profile.
I hope this post gave you enough information on implementing Google Analytics with Joomla. Feel free to post comments or any queries you might have.
